Patients can only be permanently registered with one NHS GP Surgery at any one time. This should be a surgery close to where the person is ordinarily resident for the majority of the time. For boarding school and university students this will be where they are studying. Even if students return home at weekends it is important to remember that there is no access to GP surgeries for urgent medical problems at weekends and therefore it makes sense to be registered where the student is resident Monday-Friday.

The majority of boarding schools require students to be registered with a GP surgery local to the school. Often staff from the GP attend school to see patients. If your child has a long-term medical issue it is worth discussing the management of this with the new GP surgery and ensuring that clinical staff have access to all relevant medical history.

Many issues can be managed remotely so even if a student is living back at home prescriptions can be requested and sent electronically to a local pharmacist, eConsults or electronic requests can be made regarding medical issues and telephone / video consultations can take place.

As a parent you can contact your child’s GP surgery at school on their behalf via telephone or eConsult / email. It is important that you have these contact details in case you need to contact the surgery when your child is living at home with you. Often parents have a school email but this is not the same and unlikely to be accessible during school holidays.

It is always preferable to contact the registered GP surgery as they have the complete medical history. Being able to access current medical information is important to be able to provide safe care.

If a student is living back at home and has an urgent medical need, they can be seen at Stockbridge Surgery as a temporary patient. This should be for urgent medical problems and not long-term conditions. The GPs and Nurses at Stockbridge Surgery will have no access to any recent consultations or current medication. It is preferable to contact the permanent GP surgery unless a face-to-face examination is going to be required.

These fact sheets have been written to explain the role of UK health services, the National Health Service (NHS), to newly-arrived individuals seeking asylum. They cover issues such as the role of GPs, their function as gatekeepers to the health services, how to register and how to access emergency services.

Special care has been taken to ensure that information is given in clear language, and the content and style has been tested with user groups.

Open the leaflets in one of the following languages:

English	Farsi	Urdu
Albanian	Bengali	Hindi
Arabic	Croatian	Lithuanian
Bulgarian	Punjabi	Polish
Chinese (Cantonese)	Somali	Portuguese
Chinese (Mandarin)	Gujerati	Spanish
Russian	Turkish	French