Every year NHS England and Ipsos ask millions of patients about their experience of their GP. The 700,000 responses become the GP Patient Survey (GPPS): a score for every practice, PCN and ICB in England on how easy it is to access services, how they make contact, and the standard of care.
It is a valuable source of information for commissioners, individual providers, and for patients: for many practices it is the only patient experience measure that gets published.
So what does it show? (The survey was redesigned in 2024, so we can directly compare 2024 to 2026).
The national picture
General practice is recovering, in particular by improving access.
Nationally, 76.7% of patients now rate their overall experience as good, up from 73.9% in 2024.
Overall experience of making contact is up from 67.3% to 72.6%.
Ease of getting through on the phone has risen from 49.7% to 56.9%.
Contacting a practice via its website has improved even more, from 47.9% to 57.6%.
Notably, confidence and trust in the healthcare professional has stayed above 92% throughout. Patients have kept a strong trust in their clinicians; the problem is about reaching them.
Impact at PCNs with Anima
We linked the survey results to our own data to ask: do Anima practices score better?
Simply, yes - and the impact is greatest at the PCN level.
Anima helps practices close their gap on overall experience: Practices in a PCN with Anima started 2.2 percentage points behind comparable non-Anima practices. By this year, the gap has closed completely: 73.7%, then 75.5%, then 78.4%.
Anima practices have improved almost 3x faster than others since last year: These practices improved overall experience by 2.9 percentage points, vs. +1.1pp at non-Anima practices (p=0.017).
This is not regression to the mean: Compared with non-Anima practices that had the same 2024 starting scores, these practices improved 1.4 to 4.3 points faster in every lower and middle band.
This is happening at scale: These practices outpaced local non-Anima practices in the 8 ICBs where our base makes the comparison statistically valid - including by +8.1pp in the Black Country and +7.5pp in West and North London.
There are some individual results we are particularly proud to be a part of.
A PCN in Kent and Medway went from 51.5% to 73.2% on overall experience, a rise of 21.7 percentage points, with phone access up by the same amount.
Overall experience climbed +14.6pp in a PCN in north London, +13.4pp in a Northamptonshire PCN, and up to 87.2% in a south west London PCN - ten points above the national average!
See it for yourself
The GPPS survey changes are not definitive proof of causation. We know how hard Anima practices work to deliver these results, and we work hard to contribute to their success.
This is why we write our case studies, and why, on a daily basis, we refer providers to our existing customers to hear directly about our impact.