Hello
I am a newbie Developer from the Home Office. I am currently developing referral processes where we refer persons to their respectively registered GP through an email.
Currently we’re calling GP Secretaries and asking for their email address to make said referral which is long - boring and a bit of a waste of time for them and for us. But the human interaction is always lovely, staff are always friendly 
There are 1000s of GPs across the UK. How do I make a request to obtain such a dataset / use an API to retrieve information where I’d be looking to search by exact postcode. Again, external. I can ensure Data Protection as it’s gvt stndrds
Apologies if I’m not clear,
Hope to hear from you
Best wishes
H
A few questions, if that’s ok?
How are you determining the Registered GP for the citizen?
For contacting the GP practice, I believe that you’ve hit a general problem in that the data held on ODS is not necessarily useful to you as that data comes from NHSBSA and isn’t the administrative email/phone in many cases as one might expect.
Thanks for your response Adrian. Legal disclosures are made based on self-reporting of the person who may or may not know the name of the GP.
There is no expectation for them to know their practice’s email address
Thanks for your time and consideration
H
@Adrian_Hall is there any potential if we have the NHS Number of the person we’re serving or still a dead end?
Best wishes
H
If you have the NHS Number, and you have a valid use case to connect to PDS and see more data, you could be able to pull the Registered GP ODS code from the PDS record.
However, you will still hit the issue of the ODS record not necessarily having the right contact details for the administrators at the practice - the address will be valid, however.
Help me reimagine the process here @Adrian_Hall
If I have the NHS number; is there a mechanism where I can notice the practice from your end (again, legitimate reason being ‘Safeguarding Referral’ restricted to Officer usage whom is trained in safeguarding) where I can notify on the specific person’s practice (through NHS systems) without the need of retrieving the email and doing an outlook email referral? Does that make sense 
Thank you for your consideration
PDS doesn’t provide a mechanism to communicate with the GP Practice, it can only tell you where someone is registered.
I’m not aware of a service that could do this for you without significant development work (e.g. maintaining GP contact data and providing messaging specifically for this), sorry.
It would need to have massive benefits to outweigh the costs of implementing something for your use case.
There are existing ways that services communicate with GP practices, but these are all established care paths and document sending services as far as I am aware.
If all you want to do is send a message to the registered GP, there isn’t a “simple” service to do that that I know of. I will flag this to some colleagues just in case there is something I am not aware of.
I feel based on this information I have come to a dead end. My best chase is to request data set of GP email addresses. Forgive me for taking your time, but who would be my best chase even if this is external to this forum
Thanks once again for your consideration
Sorry, not sure.
NHSBSA is where ODS data comes from for GP Practices, but it is oriented around prescribing, so not admin info.