GP Patient Survey key insights and takeaways

For healthcare organisations making patient-orientated decisions, the GP Patient Survey can provide great insights. That’s because the Survey is an annual report providing key information on how patients feel about their care. 

Whether you’re part of an HR team looking to improve patient communications, looking to develop targeted healthcare advertising campaigns or focusing on making better patient decisions, these key insights and takeaways are for you.

The GP Patient Survey collects a range of survey data from patients’ local GP practices. They ask questions about:

Healthcare services (including GP practices and pharmacies) looking to improve their communications and delivery can find this information invaluable. They can also find out about their patients’ preferred method of communication, such as whether they prefer to call for appointments over the phone or schedule them online. 

It might be useful to take on board some changes made to the survey this year. These include changes to the methodology which means you can’t compare this year’s findings with those of previous years. The questionnaire itself has been updated to better reflect how patient care services are delivered.

Additionally, the GP Patient Survey now takes an ‘online first’ approach, which they claim might have an impact on reported trends in patient experience. It’s important to note that these changes might just reflect a change in a switch from paper surveys to online ones and who might answer them. That is, rather than a change in patient experience itself.

Usually, patients of a local GP practice enter the GP Patient Survey. Patients can complete the survey via post or online. This makes it broadly accessible to a wide range of people. However, the GP Patient Survey is moving towards an ‘online first’ approach.

Via the GPPS Analysis Tool, GP Survey results can be filtered by demographics such as age, gender, ethnicity and deprivation level. As such, healthcare providers can find out how different patient groups feel about their care.

It could be that patients in a certain demographic prefer certain types of outreach – for example, older patients might prefer to communicate over the phone rather than via online patient service portals.

There were 699,790 valid responses to the Survey in 2024, with the response rate to surveys sent out as 27.3%. It includes responses from patients aged 16 or over and are registered at a GP practice in England.

The latest GP Patient Survey took place in 2024, and provides key insights into patient sentiments about primary care. Alongside giving information about GP care, the survey this year also provides insights into satisfaction with pharmacies. With pharmacies taking on more primary care and supervision, this survey is now much more relevant to them.

While quality of care is good, communication is perhaps lacking. The latest survey found that trust and satisfaction of care was overwhelmingly good, but patients may not find it easy to get appointments. While there has been a shift towards using online services to book appointments and access care summaries, more than half of patients do not find it easy to use these services to contact their GP.

Let’s break down some of the key insights and takeaways from this year’s Survey:

The overall satisfaction with GP practices remains good (73.9%) and the overall satisfaction with pharmacies was good (87%). You can find a clearer breakdown of GP practice satisfaction below:

When it comes to the quality of care itself, the majority of patients found their experience good. 92.3% had confidence and trust in their healthcare professional and 89.9% found their needs were met during their last appointment.

The most satisfied age demographics were both 85+ and 75 to 84 (84.0% for both). The younger the patient was, the less satisfied they were with their GP practice – 16-24 and 25–34-year-olds were the least satisfied (67.1%). One possible interpretation of this is that patient services are better equipped for older patients.

However, the reasons could vary from practice to practice. Getting a more refined breakdown of the needs of younger patients could be a great step for healthcare providers looking to boost their satisfaction for this age demographic.

Patients from African and Caribbean ethnic groups reported the highest positive overall experience. The second-highest positive overall experience was reported from Irish and any other Black, Black British, Caribbean, or African backgrounds, along with people from English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British backgrounds. The least positive overall experience was reported by patients from Irish Traveller and Bangladeshi backgrounds.

In terms of satisfaction by sexuality demographic, the most satisfied patients were straight (74.6%). The ‘prefer not to say’ group had the least satisfaction with their GP practice (66.6%), followed by gay and lesbian patients (68.7%). 

In this next section we’ll look at how easy it was for patients to get an appointment this year. We’ll also look at how helpful they found receptionists and admin staff. 

Patients overwhelmingly found their receptionist and admin staff helpful (82.6%). 41.6% of patients found them very helpful, while 41.0% found them fairly helpful. 11% found them not very helpful and 6.1% found them not at all helpful. 

Patients overall found it easier to contact their GP service via phone rather than using the practice website or NHS app. This means that while there is a shift towards using online services to book appointments and contact GPs, patients are mostly finding it easier to still use the phone (49.7%). 47.9% of patients said their experience of contacting the GP practice via their website was easy, while 44.8% said it was easy via the NHS app.

Healthcare providers can look at some of the key takeaways above to identify potential weak spots in their services. For example, they could ask why certain patient demographics are more dissatisfied than others. Looking at boosting diversity and inclusion initiatives could help improve satisfaction for patients with protected characteristics. 

Providers looking to target more dissatisfied demographics may have to build more of a relationship of trust. They could benefit from using further surveys as well as anecdotal feedback to get a better sense of their concerns.

Healthcare providers may be missing out on providing the best possible care to patients who don’t identify as straight. Since the ‘prefer not to say’ group was the least satisfied, this may point towards certain demographics who do not feel empowered to state their sexuality. Because of this, healthcare providers may be missing out on supporting vulnerable individuals who’ve chosen not to disclose this information. 

When it comes to ease of access, there are some areas that could be improved. Patients are generally finding it difficult to reach their GP in general both by phone or online services. This is made harder when using online technology. Considering the majority of patients use online GP services (69.0%), this could reveal some issues with technology ease of use. 

Therefore, it could be useful for practices to revisit how they communicate with their patients using phone and online services. Some next steps could be to look at some of the issues patients are facing with using online technology and helping to resolve them.

With the help of patient satisfaction surveys, you can gain even more detailed information about your patients. Our customisable customer satisfaction survey template is great for this purpose. You can collect survey responses via email, QR, website, SMS, social media and more.

Want to get a snapshot of patient health before they come in for their first visit? Our health check-in survey template can help you ask patients about:

If you’re an organisation looking to improve your online services, you could benefit from our expert-certified website feedback survey template. Using this, you can gather feedback on:

The 2024 GP Patient Survey provides a great insight into how patients are feeling about their practices. Whether you’re a practice, pharmacy, or working in another healthcare sector industry, the Survey can provide valuable insights into specific demographics and their attitude towards their primary care.