Practice Business Manager Bex Cottey describes the benefits of Register with a GP surgery for practices and patients:

We’ve been offering online registration using the Register with a GP surgery service for more than a year.

We find it really useful, especially when people are wanting to register a whole family. They can do it in their own time, they’re not standing at the front desk for hours, filling in everybody’s information.

We would often have people that couldn’t remember the name of the medication their child was using, and they would have to go home, look it up and come back with the paper registration. This is now a thing of the past, though we do have the new look paper form for anyone that needs it.

Sometimes using our previous registration system, we would end up with incorrect information, which we would then have to correct later on. The new service saves us a lot of time, we don’t have to do any detective work to find the patient in the NHS national database or manually input or scan any documents. It’s already in a format which lends itself to copying and pasting into our clinical system, and in the future this information will move across seamlessly.

Patients can get their family or carers to register them with us online too – they don’t need to spend time travelling back and forth on behalf of someone who is housebound or needs things doing for them.  We’ve just had 33 new care home residents registered this way.

My advice around all tech within general practice would be, don’t wait until it’s perfect, because there’s always going to be something new coming down the line. You don’t say, I’m not going to buy a phone because there’s going to be some operating system changes coming up. You just buy it and use it as it is, get familiar with how it works and then you’re ready for the software upgrade which will make the functionality even better.

Practice Business Manager Bex Cottey, Conisbrough Group Practice