Armed forces patients are no longer registered with a GP, although their demographics details remain on national IT systems. This also applies to their dependents and other entitled civilians.

Some NHS hospitals, such as the University Hospital Birmingham, treat a significant number of armed forces personnel and service dependents in embedded MoD Hospital Units.

In these cases, any military security information, including the patient's rank and service number, must be held securely.

In the case of service dependents only, the NHS continues to be responsible for the movement of their primary care record between and within the NHS and Defence Medical Services. This process is managed by the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) National Back Office.

What happens now?

Currently the MoD Commercial Branch and Bills Agency both require that NHS hospitals report using the AF personnel number and other military information. This and any other information with military connotations must be held securely.

When a service dependent registers for primary care services with a Service Medical Unit, the unit informs the PDS National Back Office.

The PDS National Back Office will then request the patient's records from their previous GP and then send them to the unit.

When a service dependent returns to register with a civilian GP, the PDS National Back Office manages the movement of the records to the new GP. Only primary care records are affected by this process.

Future work

The Department of Health and the Ministry of Defence have agreed that the NHS umber will be used in exchange of information between the NHS and MoD domains in preference to AF personnel numbers.

NHS Connecting for Health and the MoD are now working together to align existing business processes with the NHS number policy.

Once this work has been completed, NHS Care Records Service systems will be expected to make the AF information unavailable.

In the future, the Ministry of Defence will use the NHS Care Records Service support care to military patients under the Defence Medical Information Capability Programme (DMICP).