Catchment areas are a joke and here's why

I picked up a copy of the Times this morning unaware of plans to end the catchment area arrangement that define which GP and/or surgery you can access dependant on your home address but I wish I had known about it yesterday.

Andy Burnham's announcement was particularly galling as I had spent half of yesterday trying to reason with my student’s only practice that I as a student might be allowed to continue to register there. I was chucked out five minutes later after being continually registered at the practice for 8 years.

The difficulty was that the surgery operates on the same catchment area principle as any other which is meant to limit over crowded patient lists in popular surgeries and/or in high population density areas of the country.But as a student practice, this surgery doesn't have a popularity issue or a population issue, the number of students attending various institutions in the area is known in advance and one cannot attend the surgery without prior academic registration. In terms of the surgery, it can offer a quick method of contacting your department or tutor if they wish to know about absences, exam attendances etc. It was and is a superb service and recognizes unusual illnesses predominant in young people (and saved my life once in doing so) and the risks of illness in cramped accommodation and lecture halls setting up flu jabs and various other services.

So why throw me out for living 500 yards outside their catchment area? They even knowingly made it harder to access other services where NHS Leeds take up patients on site in the surgery for other treatments. There is no such option in surgeries closer to my home address which the GP I saw yesterday acknowledged (just before I left). It’s not as though the area is very wide, my postcode has many students ineligible to attend the student practice living there as my new practice confirmed. (I went and registered yesterday as well.)

My home address is approximately 3 miles from uni. The student practice is 500 yards from the uni. Great if I'm ill when I'm in uni all day, yet there was no acknowledgement that the catchment area arrangement was about to end. They surely must have known there was consultation or plans to modernize it anyway. Had I known, I would have phrased my conversation with that GP completely differently.