Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the average time taken for the transfer of documents between GP surgeries when a patient move to a different health area was in each of the last five years.

The Department does not collect information on the time taken to transfer documents between general practitioner (GP) surgeries.

The GP contract requires GP practices to use the electronic facility known as “GP2GP” for the safe and effective transfer of any computerised patient records where they have access to this system. As at end September 2015, 97.2% of GP practices were using GP2GP. 5,859,890 patient electronic health records have been transferred by GP2GP to the patient’s new GP since 2007.