General practice activity: October to December 2025

The purpose of these statistics is to quantify the volume of key activities performed in general practices, including appointments made and attended, telephone calls received, and onward referrals made.

To account for public holidays and differences in the number of days in each month, monthly statistics are presented on a per working day basis, as well as overall totals.

These statistics are produced with known limitations, explained in the quality report and are classified as ‘official statistics in development’.

Figure 1: estimated average number of appointments per working day each month by appointment status, October 2021 to December 2025

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Description of figure 1: line chart showing attended appointments per working day have been on a broadly downward trend over the last three years, while non-attended appointments have increased slightly over the same period. There are large peaks in all appointment categories in October of each year, which aligns with the busiest period of the flu-vaccination programme.

Source: Primary Care Information Portal, Digital Health and Care Wales

Estimated number of general practice appointments by appointment status, area and month (StatsWales)

Based on activity between October and December 2025, with comparisons based on the same period in the previous year:

• there were an estimated 4.9 million appointments scheduled in general practices, equivalent to 77,000 appointments per working day
• the number of scheduled appointments decreased by 6.2%
• 91.5% of appointments were attended, a decrease of 1.2 percentage points
• 70,000 appointments were attended per working day, a decrease of 7.4%
• 74.9% of attended appointments were face-to-face, an increase of 5.4 percentage points
• 23.6% of attended appointments were remote, a decrease of 5.5 percentage points
• 1.5% of attended appointments were home visits, an increase of 0.1 percentage points
• 58.3% of attended appointments were with a GP or independent prescriber, a decrease of 3.7 percentage points
• 41.7% of attended appointments were with a nurse, allied health professional or other clinical staff member, an increase of 3.7 percentage points
• 68.2% of attended appointments were for chronic, planned or non-acute reasons, an increase of 1.9 percentage points
• 31.8% of attended appointments were for urgent or acute reasons, a decrease of 1.9 percentage points

In addition to appointments, there were:

• 390,000 referrals for specialist services, an increase of 2.4%
• 170,000 fit notes issued, an increase of 6.2%
• 6.2 million calls received, equivalent to 98,000 per working day, a decrease of 6.2%
• 57.4 of calls were answered within two minutes, a decrease of 2.2 percentage points
• 1.9 million letters or emails issued, a decrease of 1.3%
• 2.4 million text messages sent and received, an increase of 21.0%
• 1.7 million digital requests submitted, an increase of 11.5%

This publication is based on data extracted from the Primary Care Information Portal on 5 February 2026 and includes new data for October to December 2025.

There is an ongoing programme to roll-out a single appointment system to all practices in Wales, that is planned for completion by summer 2026. This means that some practices have transitioned systems around the data reference dates, which may lead to additional data quality issues. Where data quality issues are identified, they are shared with Digital Health and Care Wales who work with health boards and practices to improve data quality. The statistics for the most recent quarter are based on the data as initially recorded. Erroneous data are usually edited in the source data after publication and statistics are then revised in the subsequent quarter’s publication.

Data for January to September 2025 have been revised in line with our planned revisions policy. There was a 27.6% change for fit notes issued at Wales level, as a result of correcting erroneous data recorded in the previous quarter. Changes for all other measures were small ranging from 0.1% to 2.7% for appointments data and between 0.1% and 1.0% for additional activities.

The data for April to December 2025 will be revised in the next publication.

NHS Workforce and Primary Care Statistics
Email: stats.healthinfo@gov.wales

Media: 0300 025 8099