Where to start
Accessing primary care data
Primary care data relates to data in general practice and community settings. While there have been great efforts to create national standards for secondary care data through hospital episodes statistics, there’s less progress towards a single national approach to accessing primary care.
Primary care data is often seen as a difficult area to extract data, and our sites found it difficult to access primary care data at first. However, a number of resources are easily available which can provide a picture of primary care which is valuable for improvement work.
QOF data has been used effectively to show variation between GP performance, and several measures are available which can be useful for COPD projects.
Historical admissions data by PCT can be obtained from HES data, which can be obtained from sites such as NHS Comparators, the NHS Atlas of Variation, or extracted directly from HES by analysts.
Sites have also had success in extracting primary care data using audit tools, which have included MIQUEST queries, and automated tools such as POINTs or Optimal Patient Care.
For further information on how to access these resources, please see the sources of data section.
Further information