How PTI data are collected

PTI data submissions are received from each general practice's clinical system on a monthly basis, which for most practices is a fully automatic process. Data are extracted from every recorded contact between a member of the practice team and the patient. The practice can decide if the data are entered directly into the clinical system by the clinician or recorded onto a custom capture sheet for data entry by practice support staff. All face-to-face contacts between GPs (including locums) or practice nurses (and from April 2003 to March 2006 also community nurses) and patients (including temporary residents) are recorded. These include house calls and out of hours contacts relating to the practice's own patients, but exclude telephone consultations.

Clinicians are asked to describe the signs, symptoms or diagnoses as applicable to that contact as specifically as possible. These are recorded in the practice computer system using the 'Read' clinical coding system. There is no physical limit to the number of Read codes that can be entered in respect of a single contact with a patient, but very rarely more than ten codes are recorded for one consultation and more commonly just a couple. Nursing staff are asked to record the main activity carried out during the consultation, along with the reason (diagnosis, symptom/sign) for this activity (if appropriate). PTI can provide a list of common nursing activities to assist correct data recording. GPs are generally not expected to record activities unless there is no morbidity (e.g. giving vaccinations).

Currently, the majority of PTI practices use GPASS (General Practice Administration System for Scotland) to enter their data, although a number of participating practices use other systems such as InPS Vision and EMIS. The PTI team at ISD are further developing guidelines to enable the extraction of comparable data from these other systems and inclusion of these data in analysis.

Because PTI data are extracted every month, the team at ISD monitor the data continuously and provide timely feedback regarding any data recording issues. Practices receive regular reports on data quality as well as summaries of data recorded within their practice in comparison to national estimates.