BARTS AND THE LONDON :

ENDOCRINOLOGY TELEPHONE ADVICE CLINIC

FOR NEW PATIENTS

If you are speaking to a GP who would like to use this service, please advise them of the following:

How to refer to the telephone advice clinic

Please use one of the following routes of referral:

(PLEASE NOTE THE AMENDED TELEPHONE AND FAX DETAILS):

· Fax the referral to 0203 465 6148. Mark for the attention of the endocrine telephone advice clinic.

· E-mail the referral to btl-tr.Bartsendocrinologyadvice@nhs.net

· Telephone the referral to 0203 465 5044 (24-hour answerphone)

In all cases please provide the following details:

· Patient name, address and date of birth

· Outline of the clinical query

· Name of GP requesting advice

· E-mail address of the GP [where possible] to confirm telephone clinic appointment time

Direct contact number for advice call (and if necessary, times of availability or unavailability)

In general we will aim to offer an advice telephone discussion to the GP within 2 weeks of the referral. Most of the consultations will occur between 2 and 4pm on Mondays and Thursdays. However alternative times can be accommodated if requested, provided that sufficient details and contact information provided.

We hope that the Endocrinology telephone advice clinic will prove to be a useful and user-friendly service. We look forward to receiving feedback in due course and will endeavour to accommodate the comments.

What is the telephone clinic?

The Department of Endocrinology is pleased to announce the start of a new service for our colleagues in general practice. We believe that we share a common goal of high-quality, efficient and cost-effective patient care. In line with the current guidance on “Care Closer to Home” a number of patients could be managed in a way more convenient to them and at a lower overall cost to the NHS.

This telephone consultation advice service is for primary care physicians seeking advice about patients with endocrine problems. The aim of this would be to ensure that the right advice is obtained at the minimum necessary cost, using booked telephone consultations about named patients.

Why use the telephone advice clinic?

A number of patients we see could be managed without referral to hospital if appropriate advice and support were available. The telephone clinic will be led by a Consultant Endocrinologist who will allow sufficient time to address all of the questions and issues you would like to discuss. This will ensure a more detailed conversation than is achievable by the previous approach of contacting the busy ward Registrar for brief advice.

We hope that such an approach will benefit the patients, who could then receive care closer to home. We also hope that it will also indirectly benefit your Practice by freeing up new patient slots at the hospital for more rapid access for your patients with more complex endocrine problems.

The mechanism for this clinic should ensure that the service is accessible and user-friendly, with advice slots on more than one day of the week during the interval between General Practice morning and afternoon clinics. This has to be balanced by designing a service which is feasible and practicable to deliver. The benefits include a consultation at a cost significantly less than the cost of a new patient appointment, a named hospital point of contact with a designated time-slot for discussion with a specialist consultant and potentially a more convenient location and type of care for the patient.

With a proportion of patients managed in this way, one of the side-effects will include shorter waiting times overall for patients who do still require hospital assessment.