Practices from four primary care organisations (PCOs) have put performance data online as part of a project to test the best way of providing information to patients.
Details such as vaccination rates and percentage of patients with diabetes who have had their blood pressure checked in the last five years are included in a bar chart alongside comparisons with PCO averages. The website also presents patient satisfaction survey results compared against national averages.
More medical performance data from practices’ Quality and Outcomes Framework results may be added in coming months.
The website, www.yourguidetogeneralpractice.org.uk, is part of a project run by the National Primary Care Research and Development Centre in Manchester in collaboration with the Primary Care Group of Swansea University’s School of Medicine. It aims to evaluate the extent to which PCOs and general practices are prepared to publish information about the quality of care that they provide.
The project involves 17 practices from two PCTs in England, Salford and North Eastern Derbyshire, and two local health boards in Wales, Neath Port Talbot and Swansea.
Professor Martin Marshall, who is leading the project, told EHI Primary Care that his team had been working with the practices and patients for three years to develop the sort of information that patients themselves wanted to have about practices.
Prof Marshall added: “We found that patients wanted performance information but they didn’t want it in a league table. None of our practices dropped out because they were worried about the data and I think the majority of practices feel that this data is going to be out there in the public domain anyway and that this is a sensible way of publishing it.”
As well as performance data the website also includes three opinions of the practice provided by the practice itself, patients and an anonymous researcher who visited the surgeries plus more standard GP website information such as contact details and information on clinics and surgery times.
Dr Simon Wright, a GP at the Walkden Medical Centre in Salford, said his practice was pleased with the way the information appeared on the site.
He added: “We’re quite happy with what’s on there, since we do quite well against national data, but if we were as quarter as good as the national average we might not feel the same.”
Prof Marshall said options for possible partners to work with to develop the website were currently being considered and more practices may be able to join the site later in the year.
Links