General Medical Services Contract: Quality and Outcomes Framework Statistics for Wales, 2007-08

Statistics on General Medical Services Contract: Quality and Outcomes Framework Statistics for Wales, include data for Wales for the year to the end of October 2008. The latest bulletin updates the statistics previously released on 20 September 2007.

This release presents a summary of data from the national General Medical Services (GMS) Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) during 2007-08. 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 2007-08. The QOF was first implemented in April 2004, and the financial year 2007-08 therefore represents the fourth year of the QOF. The 2007-08 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:

• 417 (85 per cent) of the 490 practices in Wales achieved 950 or more of the possible 1,000 QOF points. In the previous year, 68 per cent of practices achieved this level.
• 97 per cent of practices achieved 600 or more of the 675 potential points in the clinical domain, the major part of the QOF. This compares to 89 per cent of practices in 2006-07.
• The largest disease register in terms of the number of patients as a percentage of all patients on practice lists (% "prevalence") was the Smoking register(1) (24 per cent).
• Over all indicators 6.0 per cent of records were omitted from achievement calculations as legitimate "exceptions" under the QOF rules. There was substantial variation however between indicators and between practices.

(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 can be found on the StatsWales website

Contact

Tel: 029 2082 3598
E-mail: stats.healthinfo@wales.gsi.gov.uk