General Practice Profiles for Cancer

Download | Help and data sources | Access for NHS users and GPs | Feedback

The General Practice Profiles for Cancer are produced by the National Cancer Intelligence Network (NCIN) and give information about key indicators relating to cancer services for most GP practices in England. They are intended to help GP practices think about the services they offer to their patients, in particular those services related to recognising symptoms and diagnosing cancer earlier.

The third version of the profiles, updated for December 2012 are now available below or through the Cancer Commissioning Toolkit.

These profiles are not for assessing the performance of a practice - there is often no ‘right or wrong’ answer for an indicator and many are affected by factors beyond a GP’s control. But by looking at the indicators together, it is possible to get a ‘feel’ for those areas (indicators) that can affect or influence others, and to gain an understanding of why one indicator may look high and another low. For example, a practice with an elderly population may be expected to make more referrals with suspected cancer.

Download the profiles

The General Practice Profiles for Cancer (December 2012) are provided as Microsoft Excel workbooks, with each workbook including all of the GP practices for a particular Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG). If you do not know the name of your local CCG, you can find this using the drill down map on the NHS Commissioning Board website.

The profile workbooks are arranged by the four commissioning regions. Click 'show' next to your region and then click the name of your CCG to download the file.

London

Midlands and East

North

South

The underlying data for all practices included in the profiles can also be downloaded as a single file (7Mb).

The profiles accessible here have had some information removed to protect patient confidentiality (this is explained further in the workbooks and you can also read our approach to protecting confidentiality). Unsuppressed versions of the profiles remain available to NHS users and GPs.

Help and data sources

The profile workbooks include background information and a brief user guide. The following guidance documents provide additional details.

For general users:

How to read a GP Practice Profile - describes how to interpret the profile format.
General practice profiles for cancer, metadata (2012) - describes the data sources and processing methods for the General Practice Profiles for cancer.

For professionals:

User guidance - a how to use guide for professional users.
User guidance for audit leads - a how to use guide for Cancer Network GP Leads.

Access to the profiles for NHS users and GPs

Access to unsuppressed versions of profiles is available to NHS staff and GPs through either the Cancer Commissioning Toolkit or via PCTs and the Cancer Network GP Leads. Anyone accessing these profiles by either route is be required to comply with conditions of access and data sharing. A letter from Professor Sir Mike Richards to PCT Chief Executives sets out the arrangements for access and identifies Cancer Network GP Leads.

A quick help guide to accessing the profiles from the within the Cancer Commissioning Toolkit and help for those who need to register for access are both available.

Feedback

This is the first time such an initiative has been undertaken nationally for cancer, and we will welcome comments and suggestions as to how to make future versions and iterations more relevant and useful for those who will use them. Please email gp.profiles at ncin dot org.uk link gp.profiles@ncin.org.uk with your feedback or questions.

A Post-launch feedback log indicates preliminary responses to the release and how the NCIN team propose to address the feedback.