Overview
PCSE manages patient registration processes for GP practices across England, processing over 6 million patient registrations annually.
Accurate patient registration is critical for continuity of care, safeguarding patient data, and ensuring GP practices maintain correct patient lists.
What we do:
- New Registrations & Updates: Handling new patient registrations, adoptions, gender reassignments, and updates to demographic details.
- Data Quality Management: Investigating and resolving issues such as duplicates (patients with multiple NHS numbers) and confusions (linked records causing mixed clinical data), which can impact patient safety.
- Address Verification (FP69 Flags): When correspondence is returned, PCSE raises FP69 flags on the Personal Demographics Service (PDS). Practices must confirm or update patient addresses promptly to avoid removals from lists.
- Special Cases: Support for temporary registrations, homeless patients, refugees, private patients, and those in secure or detained estates.
Select the relevant tile below to find out more about each topic.
Important update
Sullivan review: process change for re-assigning gender and sex identity in the GP record
An independent review published by Professor Alice Sullivan that looked at data, statistics and research on sex and gender has identified a serious safeguarding risk in the current process of re-assigning gender and sex identity in medical records for children and young people.
In response, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has directed that the process for changing NHS numbers and gender markers for children and young people under 18 is stopped with immediate effect.
Need to find an NHS number?
Use the link below to access the NHS website, where you can check for a patient's NHS number.
Additional Support
Visit the Resources page to access patient registrations user guides.
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