General Medical Services Contract: Quality and Outcomes Framework Statistics, 2008-09

Statistics in “General Medical Services Contract: Quality and Outcomes Framework Statistics for Wales, 2008-09” include data for Wales for the year to the end of March  2009. The latest bulletin updates the statistics previously released on 15 October 2008.

This release presents a summary of data from the national General Medical Services (GMS) Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) during 2008-09. The Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) is a system of financial incentives. It is about rewarding contractors for good practice (and its associated workload) through participation in an annual quality improvement cycle. Whilst it is voluntary all practices in Wales participated in 2008-09. The QOF was first implemented in April 2004, and the financial year 2008-09 therefore represents the fifth year of the QOF. The 2008-09 data is illustrated in terms of achievement, exception reporting and the number of patients on disease registers i.e. prevalence.

The key points from the latest bulletin are:

• 332 (68.3 per cent) of the 486 practices in Wales achieved 950 or more of the possible 1,000 QOF points. In the previous year, 85.1 per cent of practices achieved this level, but because of the introduction of new indicators in the patient experience domain the methodologies are not comparable.
• 95.5 per cent of practices achieved 600 or more of the 650 potential points in the clinical domain, the major part of the QOF.
• The largest disease register in terms of the number of patients as a percentage of all patients on practice lists (% “prevalence”) was the Smoking(1) register (25.2 per cent).
• Over all relevant indicators, 6.6 per cent of records were omitted from achievement calculations as legitimate “exceptions” under the QOF rules. There was variation however between indicators and Local Health Boards.

(1) This is a register of patients with one or more specified conditions who are recorded as smoking. It is not a register of all smokers.

Contact

Tel: 029 2082 5064
E-mail: stats.healthinfo@wales.gsi.gov.uk

Next update

September 2010 (provisional – to be confirmed on the Due Out Soon page)