Blog › How to choose a GP surgery
For patients · Choosing a GP surgery · Published NHS data
How to choose a GP surgery: what the numbers can tell you, and what they can’t
My mother rang to ask which surgery she should move to. She wasn’t happy with hers, there were half a dozen within a mile, and every one of them said “Good” on the CQC website. I’m a GP with a shelf of NHS data at my desk, and I still had to think about how to answer her. This is what I told her.
By Dr Yogasakaran Arjuna · 13 September 2026 · GP Patient Survey 2026, FFT, appointments, telephony, workforce, QOF 2024/25, CVDPREVENT, COVER and CQC data · every practice in England
01First: who will actually take you?
Before any of the numbers, the boring question that decides everything.
Every GP surgery in England has a catchment area — a boundary written into its NHS contract for the addresses it registers. It is not the same as “nearby”. When I put my mother’s postcode into our data, the second- and third-closest surgeries to her front door turned out not to cover it at all, while three surgeries further away did. Some practices will register out-of-area patients if you ask, but you shouldn’t build a shortlist on the assumption.
The practical order is therefore: find the surgeries whose boundary covers you, then compare them. The Find a GP near me page does that automatically from a postcode, using the published boundary data, and flags the nearby ones that don’t cover you.
02The one number to start with
If you only look at one figure, look at this one.
Every year the NHS posts the GP Patient Survey to a sample of patients at every practice in England — around 700,000 people reply. One question asks how you’d describe your overall experience of the practice. Across England, 77% say good. A practice at 90% and a practice at 60% are, in the eyes of the people who actually use them, different places.
Two health warnings. It’s a survey, so at a small practice the number may rest on 40 or 50 replies — the page marks anything under 30 as a small sample. And it measures satisfaction, which is not quite the same as quality: a practice can be liked and mediocre, or excellent and brusque. That’s why the rest of this guide exists.
03Getting through: what patients say, and what the phone system shows
Two independent sources that ought to agree — and when they don’t, that’s worth knowing.
The survey asks whether it’s easy to get through on the phone; nationally, only 57% say yes. Separately, most practices now use cloud telephone systems that report to NHS England every month. From those we know that across England one caller in four hangs up before being answered, and 8% of the calls that are answered have queued for more than five minutes.
Put the survey answer next to the phone-system figures for the same practice. In my mother’s area the two agreed almost perfectly — the practice where 80% said it was easy to get through was the one where 18% of callers gave up; the one at 48% was the one at 24%. When they disagree, believe the phone system: it counts every call, not a sample.
If you’d rather not phone at all, two more figures matter: how many patients use the NHS App (England: 76% of over-13s are registered) and how many online requests the practice receives per month per 1,000 patients (England: 149). A practice with 8 online requests per 1,000 does not, in any meaningful sense, offer online contact, whatever its website says.
04Seeing the same doctor
The measure most patients don’t know exists, and the one I’d weight most heavily for anyone with a long-term condition.
The survey asks whether you have a GP or nurse you prefer to see, and if so, how often you get to see them. Nationally, of those who have a preferred clinician, 42% usually get them. The spread between practices is enormous — from under 20% to over 70% in a single postcode area — and it’s the figure most likely to separate a practice that is organised around continuity from one that is organised around the next available slot.
Continuity isn’t a nicety. The research on it is consistent: patients who see the same GP over time have fewer emergency admissions and, in the larger studies, lower mortality. If you have even one long-term condition, this is the column I’d sort by first.
05The medicine itself
Surveys measure the front desk. These measure the clinic.
Every practice in England reports, through the Quality and Outcomes Framework, how well its patients with common conditions are actually controlled. The catch is that the headline QOF “achievement” scores are capped and adjusted until nearly every practice shows 95–100%, which tells you nothing. What you want is the raw version: of everyone on the register, how many are at target? Nationally that looks like this:
| Measure | England | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Blood pressure controlled (under-80s) | 68% | The commonest long-term condition. Below 60% means a third of hypertensive patients aren’t at target. |
| Diabetes well controlled (HbA1c ≤58) | 57% | Hard to achieve; a practice in the mid-60s is doing something right. |
| Atrial fibrillation on blood thinners | 91% | The single most effective stroke-prevention treatment there is. Anything under 85% is a gap. |
| High-risk patients on statins | 65% | Prevention: people with a 20%+ ten-year risk of heart attack or stroke who are on treatment. |
| Cervical screening (25–49) | 67% | A proxy for how well a practice chases the things you don’t come in for. |
| Childhood MMR by age 2 | 88% | The target is 95%. Matters if there are children in the household — and for everyone’s herd immunity. |
These numbers are shaped by who lives in the area as well as by the practice — deprivation, language, age — so read them against neighbouring practices, not against the country. A practice that is ten points above its neighbours on blood pressure control is doing the unglamorous work well. In my mother’s postcode, the practice with the best clinical numbers was not the one with the best survey numbers, which is exactly the trade-off the data is there to expose.
06The CQC rating: a floor, not a ranking
Useful for ruling out; nearly useless for choosing between.
88% of practices in England are rated Good. Two things follow. First, if a practice is rated Requires Improvement or Inadequate, take it seriously — the inspectors found something specific, and the report will say what. Second, between two practices both rated Good, the rating tells you nothing at all. And check the date: the CQC has not re-inspected most Good practices in years. Of the roughly 5,900 practice ratings currently published, nearly half were issued before 2019. A “Good” from 2016 describes a practice that may have changed partners, systems and half its staff since.
07What the numbers can’t tell you
Three things to check yourself, in this order.
- Whether the list is open. Whether a practice is accepting new patients changes month to month and isn’t in any published dataset. Its page on the NHS website says, or a phone call does.
- What it feels like. Walk in. Is reception behind glass? Is there a queue at 8am? Is the noticeboard from this decade? Ask a neighbour. None of this is measurable and all of it matters.
- Whether it suits you. A practice built around same-day access and online triage is right for a working parent and wrong for an 80-year-old who wants the same doctor. Neither is better. The page can tell you which is which; only you know which you want.
What I told my mother. Pick the three columns that matter to you and ignore the rest — for most people over 70 I’d suggest sees preferred GP, easy to get through by phone and blood pressure controlled. Of the ten surgeries that covered her address, two were clearly ahead on all three. Then go and stand in both waiting rooms, because the data has done all it can.
08How to switch
You can register with any surgery whose catchment covers your address. You don’t need to tell your current surgery, give a reason, or show proof of address or ID (though it helps); your records transfer automatically. A surgery can only refuse you if its list is closed or it has another reasonable ground, and it must tell you in writing. Most now let you register online through the NHS “Register with a GP surgery” service in about fifteen minutes. If you’re part-way through a hospital referral, say so when you register so nothing falls between the two.