The annual national GP patient survey - representing patients' views of their GP practices - has just been published for 2020. This is based on data taken near the start of the year.
The scoring is based on patients' classification of various features of the services. Because there is no natural absolute scale for these figures we have chosen to use the practice's rank among all practices in England.
For each practice and each measure the result is given like this:
Needs met at last general practice appointment - Yes, definitely + Yes, to some extent
0.9388 (4033 of 6732) 40.09%
The column heading summarises the question and the choice of responses for which a score is given.
The first figure (0.9388 in this case) is the proportion of respondents at that practice choosing one of those responses - in this case agreeing that their needs were either definitely or to some extent met. The entry in parentheses shows the rank of this practice among all practices for which this measure can be obtained - in this case the practice is the 4033rd from the top - even though its score of 0.9388 seems high this is misleading as 4032 practices out of 6732 have a higher (or equal) score. The percentage then expresses this ranking - 100% for the top score and 0% for the bottom score - and in this case being more than half way down the rank, the score is less than 50%.
Sometimes there is no entry - there may not have been enough answers to this particular question from the respondents.
We should not forget that the patient responses vary with demography, personal characteristics, funding, prevalence of disease which may not be attributes of the practice. Nevertheless, the gross differences can be taken as representations of patients' views.