pumpkinstrokemarrow

Many years ago when I had some contact with these matters, what would have happened when you moved was that your medical card would go from your new surgery to something called a Family Practitioner Committee (FPC: a roughly county level operation, presumably lost many waves of reorganisation ago) - which almost certainly at that time had no computer, rather a giant card index. Since the FPCs would have been different in this particular case, the receiving FPC would have sent a ticket off to the national health service central register (NHSCR) which would know which FPC you were last registered at. Your ticket would then be sent off to that FPC. That FPC, in turn, would know what doctor you were last registered with and send your ticket to him. The transfer of your medical records to their new home could then be initiated. As well as ensuring that medical records kept up with people as they moved around the country, this machinery also kept track of how many patients each doctor had and so how much they should be paid. It made sure, inter alia, that you were only registered with at most one doctor at any one time.

Now one might think that now all these outfits - or their successors - have sparkly new computers and a £20bn software system to run on them, courtesy of the New Labour love affair with the IT services industry, that the whole business of moving your ticket around would be accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse and that your records would be winging their way to your new doctor in no time at all. But it seems not.

So bearing in mind that you are now entitled to see your own medical records and doctors are no longer entitled to include offensive (while possibly true) remarks about you in them, my suggestion is that when you move, you have the option of simply carrying your medical records off with you, to present to your new doctor in due course. So he or she might actually have them when you first go to see him or her. And if, rather than it being an option, it was the drill, all that expensive machinery which has been installed so that the government can move your records around for you could be binned. And an IT services contractor would be left looking for another milch cow.