Out of Area Patient Registrations
New Registrations
All GP surgeries across the UK, agree their catchment area with their local ICB, which indicates how far they are able to provide safely home visits and urgent treatment for their patients. While we endeavour to provide care to as many patients as possible, we cannot safely offer services for patients beyond our catchment area.In order to ensure we are able to provide a high standard of care to all of our patients, the practice is unable participate in the out-of-area (OOA) registration scheme. This means we do not allow new patients to register with us if they live beyond our catchment area.
Existing Patients
We understand that some of our currently registered patients would like to remain registered with us due to familiarity and for continuity in their care. However patients who move out of our catchment area may have difficulty accessing other local services such as antenatal, maternity, social care and urgent care services. Additionally this can cause difficulties with referrals; there can be restrictions to how and where we can refer patients as some referrals are based on their address.
We are limited when it comes to referrals beyond our local area and this means that there may be times a referral will be rejected simply based on a patients’ home address which is out of our control.
It is therefore better for patients to join a GP practice closer to home to avoid any possible delays to any treatment. Therefore patients who move out of our catchment area while registered with us will be notified they are out of area and given 30 days to find a different GP surgery before being de-registered.
The practice’s administrative team endeavours to check address changes when updating patient’s records and notifies out of area patients of the need to re-register locally as soon as possible after the move. On occasion this may be missed at the time of updating our records and so the practice conducts regular checks on patients’ addresses. If an address change is picked up during an audit, patients will be asked to re-register at a practice local to them.
Homeless Patients
We will register patients who are homeless, vulnerably housed or ‘of no fixed abode’, if they are currently staying within our catchment area. We can do this using a temporary address which may be a friend’s address or a day centre or we may use the practice address. Patients of no fixed abode will not be required to provide proof of address or ID for this. However patients who move to a temporary address outside of the practice's area will be asked to re-register at a practice local to them so that they can access local support services, and we can help facilitate this. Please see the attached leaflet or ask a member of the Patient Services Team for more information.