What is Practice Team Information (PTI)?

Practice Team Information (PTI) is a programme to collect information from a sample of Scottish general practices regarding face-to-face consultations (in a surgery or the patient's home) between patients and a member of the practice team.  The 'full' practice team includes general practitioners (GPs), practice nurses, district nurses and health visitors.  PTI data for the financial years 2003/04 to 2005/06 includes patient contacts with all of these clinical disciplines.  From the financial year 2006/07 onwards the community nursing element (district nurses and health visitors) has been dropped, to leave only GP and practice nurse contacts.

PTI  evolved from Continuous Morbidity Recording (CMR), a scheme that collected information on General medical Practitioner (GP) contacts only. CMR was first piloted in 1990 in a small number of practices in Scotland. By 1998 a good-sized sample of practices, all using the GPASS (General Practice Administration System for Scotland) clinical system, were participating and the CMR dataset became recognised as a 'national' dataset.

With CMR established, further developments of the dataset were made in recognition of the fact that members of the practice team other than GPs make a significant contribution to patient care. In 2001, ISD began working with CMR practices to expand data recording to the broader practice team, to include practice nurses, district nurses and health visitors. In April 2003, after pilot projects to develop the recording of information for these other staff disciplines, CMR was formally superseded by PTI. The increased scope of PTI meant that, for the financial years 2003/04 to 2005/06 inclusive, it has been possible to publish information on contacts with any of the "full PTI" team - GP, practice nurse, district nurse, health visitor.

In recent years, due to ongoing changes in the way the service is organised, community nurses found it increasingly difficult to record their patient contacts for PTI. A number of practices stopped recording district nursing and/or health visitor data during 2006/07 and others considered leaving PTI due to the disproportionate amount of resource required to sustain this part of the data collection. To safeguard the survival of PTI, the decision was taken in 2007 to stop recording community nursing data and focus on GP and practice nurse data only. This means that there are now three years of data available on the 'full' practice team (2003/04 to 2005/06) and four years of data on the "in house" practice team (GPs and practice nurses only) (2003/04 to the latest year, 2006/07).

Currently nearly 60 practices contribute to PTI, covering around 6 per cent of the Scottish population. The sample of practices included for analysis of 2006/07 data includes 45 practices with complete GP and practice nurse data for the year ending 31 March 2007, with a combined population of around 5 per cent of the Scottish population. The population in the sample is a reasonable reflection of the Scottish population with regards to age, gender and deprivation, and small imbalances due to these factors are addressed during data analysis through a process of direct standardisation (see the Statistical notes page for more details).

PTI data can be used to estimate numbers of patients consulting and the number of consultations in Scotland, shown for individual years or as trends over time, overall or broken down by gender, age or deprivation, for any condition presenting to general practice in Scotland, subject only to the limitation of small numbers for some conditions. The data can also be used to determine the most commonly seen conditions/diseases.

PTI data are frequently sought to get an indication of population prevalence of a particular condition. However, PTI can only provide estimates of prevalence of patients consulting rather than actual population prevalence (this is discussed in more detail in the section on Uses and limitations of the data ). If a wider range of staff disciplines is included, the estimated number of patients consulting is likely to be closer to the number of patients suffering from a condition (at least if some patients are seen exclusively by the additional disciplines). More information on this issue can be found on the page Impact of inclusion of more staff disciplines on patient counts.