The Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) is a voluntary annual reward and incentive programme for all GP surgeries in England, detailing practice achievement results. It is not about performance management but resourcing and then rewarding good practice.
The QOF contains four main components, known as domains. The four domains are: Clinical Domain, Organisational Domain, Patient Experience Domain and Additional Services Domain. Each domain consists of a set of achievement measures, known as indicators, against which practices score points according to their level of achievement. The 2010/11 QOF measured achievement against 134 indicators; practices scored points on the basis of achievement against each indicator, up to a maximum of 1,000 points.
- clinical care: the domain consists of 86 indicators across 20 clinical areas (e.g. coronary heart disease, heart failure, hypertension) worth up to a maximum of 697 points.
- organisational: the domain consists of 36 indicators (worth up to 167.5 points) across five organisational areas – records and information; information for patients; education and training; practice management and medicines management.
- patient experience: the domain consists of three indicators (worth up to 91.5 points) that relate to length of consultations and to patient experience of access to GPs.
- additional services: the domain consists of nine indicators across four service areas – cervical screening, child health surveillance, maternity service and contraceptive services.
The QOF gives an indication of the overall achievement of a surgery through a points system. Practices aim to deliver high quality care across a range of areas for which they score points. Put simply, the higher the score, the higher the financial reward for the practice. The final payment is adjusted to take account of surgery workload and the prevalence of chronic conditions in the practice's local area.
To report the latest annual QOF points, The NHS Information Centre for health and social care (The NHS IC) has developed this online database to allow patients and public easy access to this useful data that indicates how well their surgery is doing. The NHS IC is working to make information more relevant and accessible to the public, regulators, health and social care professionals and policy makers, leading to improvements in knowledge and efficiency.
Browse the online database to find the results for your local surgery.
Other searches will compare your local GP practice against other GP practices in the local area and the national results across England.
The online database provides easy access to comprehensive information on the pattern of common chronic diseases such as asthma, diabetes and coronary heart disease. In terms of scale, the data for QOF is collected from over 8,000 GP practices with over 54 million registered patients in England.
The QOF helps practices compare the delivery and quality of care currently provided against the achievements of previous years. Ultimately, the aim is to improve standards of care by assessing and benchmarking the quality of care patients receive. The QOF has undergone some revisions since it was first introduced. Further changes to the QOF were made at the start of 2009/10. These included the introduction of new indicators in the existing heart failure, chronic kidney disease, depression and diabetes clinical indicator sets; the introduction of two new indicators under a new cardio-vascular disease (primary prevention) clinical indicator set; the removal of two high value indicators from the Patient Experience domain; changes to contraception indicators within the Additional Services domain of the QOF; and various changes to the points values of some QOF indicators. Overall, the maximum QOF score remained at 1,000 points.
By providing this world-leading intelligence on clinical areas such as diabetes, heart conditions and cancers; organisational, patient experience and additional services domains (e.g. contraception, maternity, etc.), GPs and other health professionals can make improvements in managing patient care. This should in time lead to a reduction in avoidable hospital admissions.
The sample of the output chart above shows the results for some of the clinical indicator groups for an individual GP practice.
As well as displaying the latest 2010/11 results, the chart also displays the current year's PCT (Primary Care Trust) and England averages.
Similar charts are available for the total achievement results, the four individual domain results and the underlying achievement details for the individual indicators within each indicator group.
You can use this specially designed website to make specific searches on achievement in the following ways:
- search for any GP practice in England
- find the overall achievement score for any practice
- breakdown the achievement by a series of clinical measures
- compare local surgery achievement with other surgeries and the local PCT and England averages
- discover explanations of the QOF clinical indicators
- export simple data tables of multiple practice results
- The QOF information is collected at an aggregate level for each general practice and does not refer to specific patients, hence QOF cannot show how well your surgery treats you.
- The QOF only reflects part of the work that a general practice is responsible for, as such The NHS IC does not recommend or endorse the use of QOF data to rank practices into league tables. A fuller explanation is available on the frequently asked questions page: