General Practice - Practice Team Information (PTI)

Practice Team Information (PTI) Statistics and Analysis

NEW: On 25 August 2009 the Influenza pages were updated with information from the 2008/09 flu season

A short summary of the updated contents of these web pages is available in the Statistical Publication Notice

All other pages were last updated on 31 March 2009. The main changes were:

More recent data has been added (up to and including the financial year 2007/08)
The statistical model used to estimate numbers of patients and consultations has been updated allowing all estimates to be shown with 95% confidence intervals, indicating the precision of the estimates
For the first time PTI figures incorporate data from practices using the InPS-Vision clinical system, over and above data from practices using the GPASS clinical system, which is essential to ensure representativeness of the PTI practice sample

A short summary of the updated contents of these web pages is available in the Statistical Publication Notice.

Practice Team Information (PTI) collects information from a sample of Scottish general practices about face-to-face consultations (in a surgery or the patient's home) between patients and a member of the practice team. The practice team is currently defined for PTI purposes as all GPs including locums and registrars (GPs in training), and practice-employed clinical staff (referred to as practice nurses but also including, for example, phlebotomists and health care assistants), and for the three years between 2003/04 and 2005/06 inclusive, also community nurses (district nurses and health visitors). Currently there are around 60 practices participating in PTI in Scotland and these are broadly representative of the Scottish population in terms of age, gender, deprivation and urban/rural mix. More information on the background to PTI, how the information is collected and analysed, and the coding used, can be found in the Background to PTI section.

PTI is frequently used to estimate the number of consultations for a specific condition, and to estimate the number of patients who consult because of a condition, in any one year in Scotland. PTI estimates of the rate of patients consulting should not be regarded as identical to the population prevalence of a given condition. This is because PTI measures active problems; a lifelong or previous condition will not be recorded unless the patient had a contact with the practice that was directly related to that condition. If, for example, someone with diabetes consults because of a cold and not because of diabetes, their diabetes will not be coded as a reason for consultation.