The Effectiveness of Health Care Teams in the National Health Service

Whole time equivalents
Using hours worked to calculate team size enabled an estimate to be made of the
number of ‘whole time equivalents’. This statistic shows that team size varied from
1.49 to 31.9 members. The mean size was 9.35 with a standard deviation of 6.75.
The size of teams working in so-called ‘single handed GP practices’, ranged from
1.88 to 16.13, with a mean of 7.48 and a standard deviation of 3.74.
Number of GPs
The number of GPs in the teams ranged from 1 to 11. The mean number of GPs
was 3.7 and the standard deviation was 2.4 (Figure 2.5).
Whole time equivalent GPs
The range of whole time equivalent GPs was from one to
ten. The mean was 3.16 and the standard deviation 2.0.
Figure 2.5: Number of GPs in the primary health care teams
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
Gender
5%
0%
Team Size (no of GP's)
1 2 3 4 to 5 6 to 8 9 to11
The majority of team members (85.5%) of the Primary Health Care team sample
were female. The break down for gender by occupational group is shown in Figure
2.7 and this reveals that the only imbalance in favour of men is in the highest status
group – GPs. Otherwise, primary health care is a domain in which women form the
vast majority of the workforce. Primary health care is largely in the hands of women
in the UK. And of course, this has important implications for our understanding of its