Did anyone send that to the patient's surgery?
A patient sees your GP, starts a new medication on a private prescription and agrees that you can let their NHS surgery know. The doctor writes 'copy to NHS GP' at the bottom of the note. Three months later the patient's NHS doctor asks them what they are taking, and nobody at the surgery has heard of it.
When you look into it, the letter was never sent, or it was sent to the surgery the patient left two years ago, or it was sent twice because two people saw the note. Nobody can say for certain which, because sending was never recorded as a step of its own.
Why sharing falls through the gaps
Consent to share with the NHS practice is often asked once at registration, then not revisited. Patients move house and change NHS surgery without telling their private GP. The NHS practice details sit in a free-text field, with no check against current contact details.
Sending is treated as an afterthought. There is no task, no queue and no confirmation, just an instruction in a clinical note that depends on someone reading it. Different doctors mark it differently, and secure email addresses for NHS practices change or are only known to one secretary.
What an unsent summary costs
| Gap | Consequence |
|---|---|
| Consent unclear | Summary held back or sent without a clear basis |
| Old NHS practice on file | Summary goes to the wrong surgery |
| No sending task | Summaries forgotten, or sent twice |
| No record of dispatch | Cannot answer when the patient or surgery asks |
| Secure addresses in one head | Delays when that secretary is away |
The clinical importance of any particular summary is for your doctors to judge. The operational failure is simply not knowing whether it went, which is a poor position for a service patients pay for.
How we track sharing with the NHS practice
- Registration captures the patient's NHS practice from a searchable list, rather than free text, and records their sharing preference in wording your governance lead approves.
- Patients are asked to confirm their NHS practice and preference periodically, such as when they rebook after a long gap.
- When a doctor marks a consultation for sharing, a sending task is created automatically, containing the summary document and the recipient.
- The task checks that consent is recorded and that the recipient address is current, and flags anything missing to a secretary.
- Summaries are sent by the secure route you approve, and the date, recipient and route are logged.
- A list shows summaries marked for sharing and not yet sent, and any that failed to deliver.
What is shared, and whether it should be, is decided by the patient and your doctors under your policies. The system records those decisions and makes the sending step visible.
What your secretaries will notice
Instead of reading every note for 'copy to GP', there is a queue. Consent and recipient are checked before sending, not after a complaint. When a patient or surgery asks, the answer is in the log with a date. And when a patient changes NHS surgery, their details are updated because they were asked, not because a letter bounced.
Doctors benefit too. They can see, next to the patient's record, which summaries have gone to the NHS practice and when, which is useful when a patient says their NHS doctor was not aware of something. The conversation starts from a fact rather than an apology.
Is sharing patchy at your clinic?
- 'Copy to NHS GP' is written in notes with no follow-up task
- NHS practice details are free text, often out of date
- You cannot say whether a particular summary was sent
- Consent to share was asked once at registration and never again
- Only one person knows the NHS practices' secure email addresses