Haresign Newsletter Volume 2: New and Updated Primary Care Data Tools

Welcome to Volume 2 of the Haresign newsletter.

This one is very much a data nerd update — which, if I’m honest, is rapidly becoming the whole brand 📊😂

Over the last few weeks I’ve been updating and expanding the free tools on Haresign.net. The aim is simple: to take public primary care datasets and turn them into something easier to search, compare, explain and actually use.

Because while the data is technically “available”, that does not always mean it is easy to understand.

Primary care is surrounded by data: appointments, patient surveys, telephony, online consultations, payments, contract activity and list size changes. But too often that information sits across multiple spreadsheets, dashboards and publications.

These tools are designed to help bring some of that together.

Updated tools now available:

Registered Patients & List Size:
https://haresign.net/tools/list-size/

The List Size tool is one of the newest additions.

It allows users to look at monthly registered patient numbers for any GP practice or PCN, including growth, age profile, sex profile and benchmarking against PCN, Sub-ICB, ICB, region and England.

It uses raw registered patient numbers, rather than weighted or adjusted list sizes, so it is best used for population trends, demographic changes and operational planning.

This can help answer questions like:

Is our list actually growing or shrinking?
Is this a local pattern or wider trend?
Are patients moving between nearby practices?
How is the age profile changing?
What might this mean for future demand?

GP Appointments Intelligence:

https://haresign.net/tools/gp-appointments/

The GP Appointments tool helps practices and PCNs explore appointment activity using national GP appointment data.

You can look at activity, access patterns, DNA rates, staff group delivery, same-day appointments, booking waits, urgent activity and comparisons against wider benchmarks.

It is useful for understanding demand, capacity, access and variation across practices or PCNs.

GP Patient Survey Intelligence
https://haresign.net/tools/gp-patient-survey/

The GP Patient Survey tool helps make GPPS results easier to review and compare.

It includes key patient experience measures such as overall experience, access, appointment waits, consultation quality and continuity of care.

This can be useful for patient participation discussions, CQC evidence, access improvement work, practice planning and PCN-level conversations.

Online Consultations Dashboard:
https://haresign.net/tools/online-consultations/

The Online Consultations tool looks at online consultation submission data.

It helps show submission volumes, clinical and administrative demand, rates per 1,000 patients, weekday trends, 8am patterns, supplier information and benchmarking.

Online consultation demand is often felt operationally before it is properly understood in the data. This tool is designed to make those patterns easier to see.

Cloud-Based Telephony Dashboard:

https://haresign.net/tools/cloud-telephony/

The Cloud Telephony tool looks at call-handling data from the national cloud-based telephony dataset.

It includes call outcomes, missed call rates, callback activity, wait-time patterns, 8am demand, trends and benchmarking.

For practices trying to understand phone pressure, this can help move the conversation beyond “the phones are busy” and into something more measurable.

NHS Payments to General Practice:
https://haresign.net/tools/nhs-payments/

The NHS Payments tool looks at payments made to GP practices and PCNs across financial years.

It includes payment categories such as Global Sum, QOF, enhanced services, vaccination payments, premises, PCN payments and other income streams.

It is not a profit calculator, and it does not show what is available for direct patient care after costs. However, it does help show where funding comes from and how payments compare on a weighted patient basis.

GP Contract Services Dashboard:
https://haresign.net/tools/gp-contract/

The GP Contract tool brings together contract-related indicators and vaccination programme activity.

It can be used to review delivery, compare activity and spot variation across practices, PCNs and wider benchmarks.

This is useful for understanding contract performance, planning work and supporting wider operational discussions.

New for account users: Practice Overview

For users with a Haresign.net account, these tools are also brought together into one easier view through the

Practice Overview tool:
https://haresign.net/tools/overview/

Rather than opening each tool separately, the Practice Overview gives a single starting point for reviewing a practice across multiple areas.

It brings together key signals from:

GP appointments
GP Patient Survey
Online consultations
Cloud telephony
NHS payments
GP contract data
Registered patient list size

The individual tools are still there for deeper analysis, but the Practice Overview helps provide a quicker, more rounded picture of a practice.

It is designed to be useful for practice reviews, PCN discussions, CQC preparation, improvement planning or simply getting a clearer view of what the data is saying.

Why build these?

Because general practice has no shortage of data, but it does not always have enough usable insight.

Practices are often trying to answer questions like:

How does our access compare?
Are our phone pressures worse than others?
Is online consultation demand increasing?
Are our patient survey results genuinely poor, or just slightly below average?
Is our list size changing?
How do our payments compare with similar practices?
What can we evidence for CQC, access improvement or PCN discussions?

The data to help answer these questions exists, but it is often scattered, awkward to navigate or difficult to explain quickly.

The aim of these tools is to make that data easier to access, easier to compare and more useful in real operational conversations.

They are not intended to replace local knowledge. The best insight usually comes when national data is combined with what practices already know from their own teams, patients, systems and context.

How you might use them

You could use the tools to:

Prepare for practice or PCN meetings
Support CQC evidence around access, demand and population need
Review patient experience trends
Understand appointment and online consultation demand
Explore phone system performance
Benchmark payment and funding patterns
Review list size and demographic changes
Support business cases and improvement plans
Sense-check whether an issue is local, PCN-wide, ICB-wide or national

In short: fewer spreadsheet-shaped headaches, hopefully more useful conversations.

Try the tools

You can find the updated tools here:

Practice Overview
https://haresign.net/tools/overview/

GP Appointments
https://haresign.net/tools/gp-appointments/

GP Patient Survey
https://haresign.net/tools/gp-patient-survey/

Online Consultations
https://haresign.net/tools/online-consultations/

Cloud Telephony
https://haresign.net/tools/cloud-telephony/

NHS Payments
https://haresign.net/tools/nhs-payments/

GP Contract
https://haresign.net/tools/gp-contract/

Registered Patients & List Size
https://haresign.net/tools/list-size/

As always, the tools are there to be used and shared.

If you find them useful, feel free to pass them on to colleagues, practice managers, PCN teams or anyone else who enjoys turning primary care data into something slightly less painful.