How to find out if a GP surgery will actually take you

This is the check almost nobody does and it is one of the sharpest differences between two otherwise similar areas. It takes ninety seconds and the answer is often not what the map suggests.

The nearest surgery may not be yours

Every GP practice sets its own catchment boundary. Those boundaries were drawn around how the practice works, not around postcodes, wards or council areas, and they can run down the middle of a street. A surgery four hundred metres away may not cover your side of the road, while one a mile off does.

The boundary is the first question, not the distance. Practices answer it instantly if you give them the postcode you are moving to.

Open list is a separate question

A practice inside whose boundary you fall can still be closed to new registrations. Closing a list is a formal step a practice can take when it cannot safely take more patients, and it is temporary, but temporary can mean months.

So the second question is whether the list is open. Two questions, one call, and you learn something no dataset will tell you — because registration status is not published nationally anywhere.

What a practice cannot do

It cannot refuse you for being old, ill, disabled, unemployed, or for not speaking English. It cannot insist on proof of address or immigration status to register, though many ask for ID and it is easier to bring some. If a practice turns you away for a reason that is not the boundary or a closed list, that is worth querying with the local NHS commissioner rather than accepting.

Ask about dentistry in the same call

NHS dental access is a harder problem than GP registration in much of the country, and it is a question people reliably leave until after they have moved. Ask the surgery whether there is an NHS dental practice nearby taking new patients. They will usually know, because they get asked constantly.

What our tool shows

Our GP and pharmacy tool lists practices within three miles of a postcode from NHS organisation data, with a Care Quality Commission rating where one exists. Across the areas we hold that is 28,940 practices and pharmacies.

What it does not show is whether any of them will take you, because that changes weekly and is published by nobody. The list is there so you know which numbers to ring.

Do it before the offer, not after

The reason to make this call early is that it is reversible information. Finding out that every practice covering a street has closed its list is a genuine reason to look at the next street, and it is a far cheaper discovery to make in week one than in week twelve.

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