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 has undergone several revisions since its introduction in 2004. The 2008/09 QOF contains four main components, known as domains. Each domain consists of a set of measures of achievement, known as indicators, against which practices score points according to their level of achievement.

• clinical care: the domain consists of 80 indicators across 19 clinical areas (e.g. coronary heart disease, heart failure, hypertension)
• organisational: the domain consists of 36 indicators across five organisational areas – records and information; information for patients; education and training; practice management and medicines management.
• patient experience: the domain consists of five indicators that relate to length of consultations and to patient surveys
• additional services: the domain consists of eight indicators across four service areas which include cervical screening, child health surveillance, maternity services, 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. Some changes were made at the start of 2008/09, with the most significant change being the introduction of two new indicators within the Patient Experience domain. The new indicators, PE7 and PE8, are derived from the results of the national GP Patient Survey, and reward practices for providing 48 hour appointments (PE7) and advanced booking (PE8). These two new indicators are worth a total of 58.5 QOF points, and their introduction coincided with the removal of some indicators (or points associated with indicators), so that 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 2008/09 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:
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