A new service for patients to confirm their address

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The NHS are launching a new digital service that patients can use to confirm or change their home address directly with the NHS. This means they no longer need to ask their GP surgery to do this for them.

They are testing the ‘Confirm your home address’ service with patients so they can confirm or change their home address. They are currently testing this service and would like to provide reassurance for patients in case they are invited to update their details.

How the service works

Patients who can access their records in the NHS App can log in to the service and change or confirm their address. Their address will be updated immediately in the Personal Demographics Service (PDS).

The service will check if the patient’s new address is within the catchment area of their current GP surgery. If the new address is outside the catchment area, the patient will be advised to register with a new GP surgery as soon as possible or contact their GP to discuss options.

Patients can also use the service to tell us if they’ve moved abroad. This will make it easier for GP surgeries to remove patients who no longer live in the UK.

Benefits

  • It’s easier to change address

If a patient moves house, they can quickly update the address on their NHS record online without having to contact their GP surgery. This shift towards updating records digitally supports our analogue to digital commitments as outlined in the 10 Year Health Plan.

  • More accurate GP surgery patient lists

By making it easier for patients to keep their address details up to date, we’ll make GP surgery patient lists more accurate. And for the first time, patients can use a digital service to tell the NHS they’ve moved abroad.

  • Fewer missed appointments

Having more accurate patient addresses will reduce the number of lost letters. This means fewer missed appointments because of letters going to the wrong addresses.

Contacting patients

The ‘Confirm your home address’ service supports the work to improve data quality on patient records and GP surgery lists.

NHS regularly check patient addresses to make sure they’re correct. If they think someone may have moved house or left the UK, they ask them to confirm their home address.