GMS1 Forms
The GPC advises that these changes were introduced from October 2017. They only apply to patients who are registering with your practice who have a non-UK issued EHIC or S1 form or who may be subject to the NHS (Charges to Overseas Visitors) Regulations 2015. These patients are invitedto self-declare at the point of registration.Practices willbe provided with a revised GMS1 form to use, as well as a hard copy of a patient leaflet which will explain the rules and entitlements overseas patients have in accessing the NHS in England. Once a practice has manually recorded that the patient holds either a non-UK issued EHIC or a S1 form in the patient’s medical record,they will then need to send the form and supplementary questions to NHS Digital (for non-UK issued EHIC cards) or the Overseas Healthcare Team (for S1 forms) via email or post. Detailswill be provided shortly about how to do this.
Although the form will identify other patients from overseas, practices are only required to send the forms for patients with a non-UK issued EHIC or a S1 form.Under this system, the patient’s country of origin will be charged where relevant. Patients themselves will not be charged for general practice services, but as now, may be charged for some secondary care services.New recurrent investment of £5 million will be added to the global sum to support this requirement and the associated administrative workload. Later in the year the GPC will discuss with NHS England how an automated process could be introduced. These discussions will also include development of systems to automatically collect GP appointment data for these patients to better enable the cost recovery from their home countries.
Note:
•There is no requirement for practices to identify overseas patients.
•There is only one GMS1 form which now includes the supplementary questions
•Only when thesupplementary questions are completed does the practice need to do anything additional to what they currently do.
•Only when the supplementary questions have been completed do practices have to send the whole form to the central service
Our thanks to Gloucester LMC for sharing this article
