How do I manage patients who are seen out of sync with their birth month?

One potential pitfall of birth month reviews is patients being seen out of sync with their birth month and then going much longer than between annual reviews. For example, you could have a patient with March birth month, attending for their annual review in April (perhaps their invite was sent late, they were slow to respond or capacity was poor?!). As all of the work is done in April, our Recall system would show them as Annual Review Green and not invite them around their birth month the following year. It's possible they could end up going nearly 2 years between reviews in this scenario.

Before you panic, its worth realising we have safety nets in place, particularly where it comes to medication monitoring:

• Patients on certain medication such as an ACE/ARB, without a UE in 14m, would be invited to attend monitoring, irrespective of their annual review/birth month. (These patients appear in section one of the monitoring invites).
• Any medication that requires annual bloods or obs, that has tests that are more than 16m overdue are invited irrespective of their annual review/birth month. (These patients appear in section two of the monitoring invites).
• Our Prescribing Module has various checks when medication is issued/requested.

We have also provided some reports that can be used to consider inviting patients ahead of their birth month to avoid a long delay:

We would recommend sense checking these patients before sending lots of invites in bulk. For example, you may find that patients are appearing because they were reviewed, but no review code was added at the time. Its possible a patient may be in there because they've only been recently diagnosed with a condition.