2022 GP Patient Survey Results Released

The latest GP Patient Survey (GPPS) results have now been published. The infographic below and national report (downloadable from the GPPS website) detail the headline findings of patients’ experience of their local GP practice and other local NHS services.

The survey asks about patients’ local GP services (including use of online services, awareness and satisfaction with opening times and preferred GPs), experience of making an appointment, the quality of care at their last appointment, overall experience of their GP practice, experience when their GP practice is closed and NHS dentistry as well as current health circumstances.

What do the findings tell us?

During the pandemic, public attitudes towards the NHS were very positive, and there was some evidence of ‘gratitude bias’ with patients adjusting expectations about care at a time when the NHS was under pressure (read more here). However, in the latest results, satisfaction with primary care has fallen significantly. While the overall trend since the survey began 16 years ago has been for a gradual decline in satisfaction, the scale of the fall this year has been significant, with a sharp decline in results for questions about overall experience of the GP practice, making an appointment, NHS dental services and NHS services when the GP practice is closed.

• Satisfaction with access to primary care has seen the largest declines – for example, 52.7% found it easy to get through to someone on the phone at their GP practice (67.6% in 2021). This result is at its lowest for the ten-year period we can measure (80.8% in 2012). In addition, 26.5% said that they avoided making an appointment because it was too difficult, compared with 11.1% in 2021.
• However, most patients continue to be positive about their experience during their last appointment, for example, nine in ten patients reported feeling confidence and trust in their healthcare professional (93.1% in 2022, 95.6% in 2021).

You can access and analyse GPPS results at national, Integrated Care System (ICS), Primary Care Network (PCN) or practice level by going to gp-patient.co.uk.

For ICS specific results, you can access individual slidepacks which bring together ICS data for key questions in one report, including trend data, PCN comparisons and benchmarking against national level data. This also includes an example of the types of demographic breakdowns available for all questions, providing insight into health inequalities.

An interactive PCN report is also available on the website: gp-patient.co.uk/pcn-report. This presents the results for all questions for individual PCNs (and variation by practice within PCN).

Use the GPPS Analysis Tool to view the 2022 results for each question in charts and tables with the option to filter for specific groups of patients by age, ethnicity, deprivation level and more. You can also create your own subgroups for analysis, run bespoke crosstabulations, and download results in PowerPoint and Excel, or see how the results have changed since 2018 by using the trend function.

Technical note

The survey received 719,137 responses from patients aged 16 years or over who are registered with a GP practice in England. The survey has a national response rate of 29.1%.

There are five comparable years of data (2018 - 2022) for the majority of questions. Minor changes were made to the questionnaire in 2022 to ensure that it continued to reflect how primary care services are delivered and how patients experience them. This followed more substantial changes in 2021. Where questions have changed significantly in 2022 or 2021, comparisons have not been made to previous years.  Further methodological information is available in the Technical Annex.

Please note that fieldwork for the survey (the period in which surveys are sent and returned) is undertaken from approximately January to March in each respective year. The 2022 survey was completed from 10 January through to 11 April 2022.

For more information, please contact the GP Patient Survey team.