2023 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 status.  

What do the findings tell us?

In the 2023 survey, 71.3% of patients reported a good overall experience of their GP practice, lower than in 2022 (72.4%), this followed a larger decrease between 2021 and 2022. This pattern is repeated across many elements of patient experience: 

• Satisfaction with access to primary care has declined over the last year – for example, 49.8% said they found it easy to get through to someone on the phone at their GP practice (52.7% in 2022, down from 67.6% in 2021). This result is at its lowest for the eleven-year period we can measure (80.8% in 2012). 
• Over half (54.4%) reported a good overall experience of making an appointment, down from 56.2% in 2022 and now at the lowest level for six years (68.6% in 2018).
• Most patients (86.2%) needed an appointment in the last 12 months. Of those, 27.9% said that they avoided making an appointment because it was too difficult, up from 26.5% in 2022 and compared with 11.1% in 2021

 A higher proportion had last tried to make an appointment in the six months before taking part in the 2023 survey than in either of the previous two years (76.6% compared with 71.3% in 2022 and 62.5% in 2021), and more similar to the level in 2020 (76.8%) and before.

• Of those offered an appointment, 72.0% were satisfied and accepted it. This was similar to the 2022 survey (71.9%), but a decrease from the 2021 survey (81.7%).

In addition, 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 (93.0% in 2023, 93.1% in 2022) and said their needs were met (91.0% in both 2023 and 2022). 

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

Use the GPPS Analysis Tool to view the 2023 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 759,149 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 28.6%.

There are six comparable years of data (2018 - 2023) for the majority of questions. Minor changes were made to the questionnaire in 2023 and 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, comparisons have not been made with 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 2023 survey was completed from 3 January through to 3 April 2023. 

For more information, please contact the GP Patient Survey team at [email protected].