Mystery shopping report: Bury GP practice registration information
Download (PDF 849.94 KB)Summary of report content
registering new patients, GP practices in Bury were following the guidance produced in 2016 (revised in February 2021) about registration of new patients
There are 29 GP practices in Bury, Healthwatch mystery shoppers managed to contact 28 of those surgeries.
The majority (93%) of the GP practices Healthwatch mystery shoppers spoke to advised patients to go into the surgery to pick up the registration form to take home for completion or go onto the GP surgery’s website and download a copy from there.
Over half of the GP practices initially said that some form of ID is required to register with the GP practice. In general GP surgeries asked to see for a proof of address, passport, birth certificate, driving license, bus pass, prescription form etc. Practices can have a policy in place to ask patients to provide identification, but they cannot insist on seeing it to register them. Seeing some form of ID will help to correctly match a patient to the NHS central patient registry and enable quicker access to any previous medical notes.
Almost all practices specified that the patient is required to live within the surgery’s catchment area
Three mystery shoppers were advised to ring 119 for further advice regarding vaccinations. Over two thirds of the surgeries (19 out of 28) said the vaccine would be arranged by their GP once the patient had been registered or they would be allocated to a vaccination centre.
The report contains four recommendations to improve registration of new patients.