Scottish Primary Care Information Resource

The Scottish Primary Care Information Resource (SPIRE) is a new national GP information system currently in development – it supersedes and builds on the data collected for PTI. SPIRE aims to include richer data from a greater number of practices and will help to inform public health surveillance, research and data linkage. Further benefits will see the creation of a mechanism to feedback data analysis to practices and an improved data extraction process.

Practice Team Information

Until 2012/13, the Practice Team Information (PTI) programme provided information on GP consultations for epilepsy in Scotland. This information could be used to estimate the national prevalence of epilepsy using information collected from a representative sample of GP practices. The PTI programme was discontinued in September 2013 and will be replaced by the Scottish Primary Care Information Resource (SPIRE). Historical information on epilepsy consultations and prevalence estimates up to 2012/13 are available from the PTI pages of the Public Health Scotland website. 

Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) data

As part of the 2004 General Medical Services (nGMS) contract UK general practices were provided with incentives to record the number of people aged 18 and over, registered with their practice and known to have epilepsy. These data provided only total numbers and did not include any breakdown by age or sex. In 2013/14 0.75% of the Scottish population were included on general practice epilepsy registers (based on practices with nGMS contracts and reportable data). Further details are available on PHS's Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) website.