GP Covid-19 payments reached £807m in 2021-2022

GP practices received a total of £807m in Covid-19 related payments in the space of 12 months from April 2021 to March 2022, according to HealthSay’s analysis of data released by NHS England. The vast majority of this, £770m, corresponds to their work in running vaccination clinics. The remaining balance relates to payments for covid support programmes and the treatment of long covid.

These payments reflect the importance of primary care in the Covid-19 response, and are indicative of the wider cost pressures faced by the NHS due to the pandemic.

Overall, GP practices received £10.5bn in fiscal year 2022. This represents just over 6% of total NHS spending in the same period.

GPs are funded according to agreed tariffs, with the core funding a GP practice receives proportional to the number of registered patients. This is then adjusted for extra services offered and payments per the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF).

Across all services, data reveals that GP practices received an average of £1.6m from the NHS in the same period, corresponding to £297 per patient per year. However, significant variations exist. Patient First Social Enterprise, an East London organisation, received more money than any other practice in the 2021-2022 financial year, receiving £32m in total. In part, this reflects the variety of specialty services offered by the practice.

Second and third were Medicus Health Partners (£17m) and Whitstable Medical Practice (£14m), based in North London and North Kent respectively. This is perhaps unsurprising, for these are among the largest practices, by number of patients registered, in England.

In terms of numbers of registered patients, London has 4 of the 6 largest, with Babylon-owned GP at Hand having more than 100’000 patients registered as of March 2023. This compares to an average of 9’723 across all practices in England.

Regionally, the Midlands has the largest number of registered patients. Accordingly, Midlands-based practices received the largest overall payments and the most written complaints.

On a practice-by-practice basis, GP practices received less than 2 written complaints per 1000 registered patients in the 2021-2022 period. Of the 10 GP practices which received the greatest number of written complaints, half of them were based in the North East and Yorkshire.