Patient Access now includes a ‘Get health advice’ feature that helps you search for symptoms and find Patient medical articles and video content to support your healthcare.  

All the articles and video content are authored/checked for accuracy by doctors and peer reviewed, so you can have confidence in finding the right healthcare guidance when you need it. 

Searching for symptoms 

You can begin searching for symptoms by clicking in the search box labelled ‘Feeling Unwell? Get health advice’ on your Patient Access home page.  

When you begin to enter a symptom, you will see suggested results shown in the drop-down box underneath. In the example below you can see the topic for ‘Anxiety’. 

You can then select an option to read more about that symptom or click ‘View all topics’ to see the full set of Health Advice articles and video content.  

Browsing all topics for symptoms 

You can also access the full set of Health Advice topics at any time by clicking on ‘Health Advice’ in the left menu.  

You will then be shown a full A to Z list of topics that you can scroll through. Each topic button provides a brief summary, clicking on a topic button will take you to a page of options. 

In the example below, you can see the options for the topic ‘Anxiety’. You can click on each button to read the Patient article or watch a video, it will launch in a new internet tab.  

An example of a Patient article page for ‘Anxiety’ is shown below. After reading the article or watching a video you can return to the Patient Access app by clicking on the relevant internet tab and logging in to Patient Access as usual.  

Contact Your GP feature 

Where your GP practice supports Patient Access and is able to provide it, you may additionally find a ‘Contact your GP’ form within the Health Advice feature. This added button helps you enter symptoms and then submit them to your GP for response. 

Patient Access is the only app to provide this ‘Contact your GP’ health advice feature that has MHRA CE mark approved software as a medical device status. 

This added functionality provides a symptom specific question and answer checklist that integrates the Patient articles and videos. Where the answers you enter indicate a critical symptom, you will be directed to contact 111 or the emergency services.  

Where your answers do not indicate a critical symptom, your answers will be collated into a form that you can then submit to your GP for their response within 2 working days.   

A GP practice can also choose when forms are unavailable. For example, if the staff memeber who manages the forms is not in work.

If a patient selects a form that's been made unavailable, this screen will be displayed in Patient Access.