The Register with a GP surgery service is free to all practices and is designed and run by NHS England. The service gives all GP practices in England a standardised way of receiving registrations online with more than 1 million patients have used a national online service to register with a GP since its launch. It makes it simpler and more accessible for patients to register with a GP and easier for practices to manage registrations. It allows practices to receive patient registrations online quickly and easily, automatically checking if the patient is in the specified GP Practice catchment area, therefore saving practices time spent matching patients to their NHS records and offering digital patient identity checks through NHS login. In the interim, to view progress use this dashboard  and click here to view suppliers currently supporting robotic process automation (RPA) for registrations.

The service also now has functionality to notify patients via a message confirming the practice has accepted them as a new patient. Responses can be sent via NHS App, email, text, or post if patients cannot be reached digitally. The service is free to all practices (and could save money for practices by not needing to send SMS messages etc.). Messages are not sent if: patients are rejected by practices, patients are registering in England for the first time, or if they are moved to practices via bulk transfer (e.g. such as through practice mergers).

All practices across the country are required to sign up for the service as of 2024.  Practices that have not enrolled in the service will be required to do so to be contractually compliant and meet the expectations of aligned modern general practice deliverables. Where this commitment cannot be met, the practice will need to confirm this with their ICB Digital and Primary Care leads providing a reason for not doing so and a date when they expect to be compliant.

Alongside this outstanding task, additional further support is required from system and local teams to increase the use of the service as the work gathers pace on integrating the national registration service into GP Clinical Systems.  Automating the service will remove ninety to ninety five percent of the manual effort when registering a patient.

To achieve a higher proportion of use, practices need to do the following:

1. Use the URL that the national service sent to them on enrolment on their new patient registration areas.
2. Remove existing links to legacy website provider webforms and/or practice generated downloadable forms.  Only the Register with a GP Surgery Service digital and paper forms are acceptable forms of patient registration for GP Practices in England.
3. Use the new paper form (PRF1) rather than the GMS1 form (which has now been decommissioned by the NHS E Primary Care Policy team).

Benefits for GP practices

• free to all practices
• saves time when capturing new registration information
• streamlines Registration process
• auto checks address against practice boundary
• connects the patients with the NHS Spine details for ID verification
• less paper

Benefits for patients

• integrated with NHS App
• can start the registration process without needing to contact the practice
• saves time using NHS Login details and no need to copy and bring in ID
• simpler user experience

Next page: NHS App