General Medical Services Contract: Quality and Outcomes Framework Statistics, 2009-10

Statistics in “General Medical Services Contract: Quality and Outcomes Framework Statistics for Wales, 2009-10” include data for Wales for the year to the end of March 2010. The latest bulletin updates the statistics previously released on 23 September 2009.

This release presents a summary of data from the national General Medical Services (GMS) Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) during 2009-10. 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 2009-10. The QOF was first implemented in April 2004, and the financial year 2009-10 therefore represents the sixth year of the QOF. The 2009-10 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:

• 297 (61.2 per cent) of the 485 practices in Wales achieved 950 or more of the possible 1,000 QOF points. In 2008-09 68.3 per cent of practices achieved this level, but because of indicator and methodological changes previous years are not comparable.
• 84.7 per cent of practices achieved 650 or more of the 697 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 (25.5 per cent).
• Over all relevant indicators, 8.9 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.

Further information

StatsWales website.

Contact

Tel: 029 2082 5039
E-mail: stats.healthinfo@wales.gsi.gov.uk

Next update

September 2011 (provisional - to be confirmed on Due Out Soon page)