Getting My Licence Back

You may remember that I don't have a driving licence at the moment because I had a few simple partial seizures again last year. The anniversary was 22nd August so, in good time, I applied to the DVLA to get my licence back.

Got an "ack" and nothing more so when the 22nd came around I phoned them up. "Ah yes" they said "your GP wrote to say he was waiting on your medical records from your old GP before he could reply".

It's now three months since we both registered with the new GP so I chased them up: had they got my records yet? Nope. And there was nothing they could do from their end. They were still lost somewhere in transit between my old surgery, NHS England and NHS Scotland.

Next stop my old surgery. They'd definitely released them for transfer a long time ago. They gave me a phone number to ring to talk to the bit of NHS England which handle this.

They were a bit of help: they couldn't undo the log jam either but said I should ask my old surgery for a "patient profile" (think executive summary) which I could then pass on to my new GP. That should give him enough info to let him write to the DVLA.

Excellent, I thought, almost there.

But no, my old surgery said they no longer had access to my records as they have released them.

ARRRGGHHHHH!!!

Luckily I got smart and emailed my old GP directly, bypassing the reception team. Did he have access? Yup. By return of email I got a 28 page PDF (which makes fascinating reading ;-) ) and a promise to forward to me anything else required e.g. detailed test results, scans of correspondence, that sort of thing.

So that's now with my new GP but Bob alone knows when I'll actually get my licence back.

The moral to this tale, and I mention it as I know of at least two other people heading north of the border soon, is to make sure you get your old GP to run you off a patient profile to take with you before you go and then hand that to your new GP when you register. That way you avoid any issues like this (and indeed Beth did precisely this, at our GP's suggestion, but it didn't occur to any of us that I might get problems this long after we'd moved).