Re:Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts...
by dmca on Saturday October 08, 2016 @05:55AM
(#12666345)
The NHS (or at least my GP's surgery) does not allow you to register as "Dr" and I wouldn't be surprised if they lacked a mechanism to change from "Ms" to "Mrs" (or any ability at all to change the title field).
I suspect they used to use title as a proxy for gender but this wouldn't be very sensible so maybe it's just there for historical purposes or no particular reason.
Re:Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts...
by DanBC on Sunday October 09, 2016 @05:15AM
(#12670429)
Admin staff in GP surgeries often don't understand the ID requirements, and also will copper-bottom any regs they do know about.
This can lead to some onerous requirements when people want to change name.
Your GP surgery should have a system for gathering patient feedback (it's something the CQC looks for) so you can try using that.
If you don't get anywhere with their process you could try your local clinical commissioning group.
If you wanted to go the technical route you could ask what software they use, and find a user group for that software to ask how it would be done.
Of course, you shouldn't need to do any of that. It sucks that they're making you jump through hoops.
I bet it's perfectly possible to change from "Ms" to "Mrs" or even from "Mr" to "Fr" or "Dr" but try to go from "Mr" to "Ms" and the whole thing HCFs. So there's now two records for me in the NHS database one for a "Mr" me and one for a "Ms" me.
It's confusing for medical peeps who need to access my records and could potentially lead to some humiliation for me (though usually people tend to assume there's some error in the system and don't pry any further).
I've done the same thing with my bank and there was no trouble at all. It's just the NHS so far.
On the plus side if I could spawn a few such doppelganger records I might even get some protection against people gathering "metadata" on myself.