Catchment area questions

You can use the NHS GP Catchment Hub to set the catchment area for your practice. This will help you identify if a patient is outside of your catchment area.

If you are having problems with your catchment boundaries, you should check the settings in the catchment tool. You can use the maps to draw or amend your practice catchment area.​

Catchment changes are published every Thursday evening, which means that there could be a delay of up to a week before changes are visible.

The Register with a GP surgery service uses the catchment information you set in the catchment hub tool to check a patient's current address. If you do not accept patients from outside your catchment area, the service will prevent them from registering.

The service also tells the patient if:

• a surgery is accepting out of catchment area applications
• if the patient is outside of the surgery's catchment area

The patient can choose to continue or to select a different GP surgery. If they continue, the service warns them that the GP surgery could reject their registration. The registration email sent to practices will highlight out of catchment registrations. 

The patient cannot continue with the application if a surgery is not accepting out of area applications. They will be told to select a different GP surgery.

The patient has to provide an address when asked because the service uses data validation.

Benefits

This will reduce the time a surgery spends confirming whether a patient lives in the catchment area.

Patients who meet the criteria for auto registration must be in your practice catchment area.

Any patients applying from out of catchment will need to be registered using your standard processes.