Three controls do most of the work on every dashboard.
The scope picker
The scope picker at the top switches the whole dashboard to a different organisation you have access to — your practice, your PCN or your ICB. Free NHS viewers can pick any practice, PCN or ICB to compare; organisation users see the organisations allocated to them.
On the PCN and ICB dashboards you can also drill through — clicking a practice or PCN takes you to its own view.
The period picker
Most dashboards report by NHS financial year. Use the period picker to switch years and compare against previous ones — trends and trajectories often tell you more than a single year's position.
"Year to date" and "End of year"
On My QOF data, a register that depends on a medication is counted two ways side by side: Year to date (a prescription since 1 April — what pays) and End of year (a prescription in the last 12 months — what your clinical system shows). They are the same question on 31 March and differ most in the spring and summer. See My QOF data dashboard for what the gap between them means and which one to reconcile against.
Reading the tiles
Each tile is one metric, showing your value benchmarked against PCN, ICB and national figures. A few habits help:
- Hover a chart for the exact numbers behind it.
- Note the direction of "good" — for some measures higher is better (e.g. achievement), for others lower is better (e.g. waits). The tiles indicate this; read the caption before celebrating.
- Benchmarks are context, not judgement — differences in demographics, deprivation and list size all matter. The Funding & equity dashboard is built to explore exactly those relationships.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure is from published NHS data (QOF, GP Patient Survey, workforce, payments, CQC and more). The Data sources page lists each dataset, how often it updates, and when it last refreshed — useful when a number looks stale.
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