There are 3 ways you can choose to treat Out of Area (OOA) registrations:
Not registering any patients who are OOA
Allow OOA registrations but pass them back to your practice for checking before automation
Allow OOA registrations and automatically register the patient
You can also set additional features:
a maximum catchment area to only allow certain OOA patients
secondary catchment area to allow patients from a separate area outside your primary catchment area
How does this work?
You'll need to make sure that NHS E Find a GP have the the correct catchment settings for your practice. If you'd like to accept out of area patients you'll need to ask the NHS E national service desk to add a tag to your surgery on the 'Find a GP' page. The national service desk can be reached at [email protected].
Not allowing any OOA registrations
If your practice does not accept OOA patients, when a patient outside your area tries to register they will receive a message saying that the practice is unable to serve them. The patient is invited to use the national service to find a GP to find a practice closer to their location.
Allow OOA Registrations
If your practice allows OOA registrations and the patient is out of your catchment area, they would receive a message once registering notifying them of the restricted set of services they can access.
By default if you choose to allow OOA patients, we will automatically register them to your practice, then Signal these patients to you in 🔮 Patients to review.
If you would like to review all OOA patients before they get registered, please let us know by contacting [email protected] or starting a live chat below 💬
Additional catchments:
You can also choose to have additional catchment settings:
A maximum catchment area is a radius which out of area patients can be accepted. This might be used where your practice wishes to accept out of area patients up to a certain point. This is also useful if you'd like to encourage your list size to grow.
A secondary catchment area is a separate catchment area which patients can be allowed to register from. This might be used if your practice accepts registrations from a care home or boarding school which sits outside of your catchment area.
If you'd like either of these set up, contact [email protected] or start a live chat below.
What gets added to the clinical system?
We add the following SNOMED code to the patients record: Registered patient lives outside practice area (finding), 824381000000105.
We add the words "OOA REG" into the notes box of GP Links.