Helen Salisbury: GP list cleansing

Each general practice looks after a registered list of patients. When a patient moves house and registers with a new surgery, their records are sent from the old practice to the new one. If a patient moves away but doesn’t register elsewhere in the UK, they remain as a “ghost” at their original practice, no longer accessing services, until their name is removed. The number of ghosts varies with patient turnover, typically being higher in practices that serve university students.A longstanding issue is that the number of patients registered with GPs in England exceeds the estimated population.1 Periodically, NHS authorities try to clean up lists by identifying patients who have had no contact with their surgery and ensuring their removal. Recently, there has been a concerted effort to “address patient list inflation,” and practices across the country have noticed a marked rise in deductions since last autumn. Each month NHS…