GP patient list has not increased by 6.4 million since 2019

The British Medical Association (BMA) is incorrect to suggest there are 6.4 million more GP patients registered in England than there were in 2019.

In a letter to the new health secretary Wes Streeting, shared on X (formerly Twitter) and viewed over 28,000 times, the chair of the BMA’s GP committee Dr Katie Bramall-Stainer said that patient numbers had “increased by 6.4 million in the past 5 years alone”.

But this isn’t right, and the patient register has only grown by about half that.

Professional bodies should take care to avoid errors in statistics they use, and quickly rectify any mistakes when they occur.

As of June 2024 (when the letter from the BMA was written), there were 63,375,801 registered patients at GP practices in England, up by 3.5 million on the 59,855,056 in June 2019.

After Full Fact raised this with the BMA, it acknowledged this was an error, and that the increase of 6.4 million is correct when viewed over the last nine years, rather than five. The BMA told us it would correct its letter and re-submit it to the health secretary. We are in touch with the BMA to ensure the public version of the letter is also corrected.

The numbers should be taken with a degree of caution, not least because the GP patient list size seems to have grown larger than the total population of England (60.9 million).

NHS England attributes this “known discrepancy” to situations when the National Patient Register retains details of a person who should have been removed. This might occur when patients move away from an area, shared custody of children resulting in split-residence and double counting, duplicate records or a person’s death.

NHS England also says there may be issues of under-coverage, occurring when someone moves to a new area and does not register with a new GP, missing numbers for armed forces members and their families, or when a patient is dropped due to “no contact”.

However, NHS England clarifies that measures are taken which it believes reduces the impact of this undercounting.