Medical Letter and Report Requests
A series of letter templates to respond to common requests from refugees and asylum seekers has been created to help GPs and their staff respond efficiently to minimise impact on workload.
Refugees and people seeking asylum can be greatly helped by letters and short reports from their GP practice. They can struggle to represent themselves and are often asked to provide letters from doctors to further their request.
Sometimes requests are important and reasonable and sometimes they are unrealistic.
Refugees and asylum seekers often do not have the money to pay for requests. Refusing to provide information because of no capacity to pay fees can be counterproductive and result in multiple attempts to persuade the practice to help, such as booking appointments with different team members and involving advocacy organisations. It can cause conflict in primary care settings as the patient can start to perceive the refusal of a letter as the problem, rather than the actual problem itself.
For further details about these documents and how to use them see ‘Index document for GP reports and letters'.