As a secondary care clinician, you will have greater certainty that the right patients will be booked into the right clinics - and that patients will attend their appointments. 

Your trust will create a directory showing all of the services they provide.  You are able to input into that process to ensure that the directory accurately reflects your services and that pertinent information is available to all clinicians who refer to your services.

In order to access Choose and Book, your trust will need to allocate you an NHS smartcard.  They will also need to make sure the necessary hardware and software is available in both the clinical and office environment.  Finally you will need to receive training from your trust in order to fully utilise the functionality of the application.

Advantages for secondary care clinicians

• It reduces the number of patients who don't turn up for appointments at hospital (DNAs)-
• Consultants in secondary care have found that using the Advice and Guidance function facilitates dialogue with GPs, helping to ensure patients are booked into the correct clinic
• Advice and Guidance may also reduce face to face outpatient appointments
• Ability to reject or redirect referrals if not appropriate for a particular clinic
• All referrals will be legible and remove the need for GPs to be contacted for clarification
• An opportunity to manage clinic workload
• Dispense with the need for paper referrals and the risk associated wtih losing them - a secure and certain way of referral
• The ability to review referrals in any clinical setting with access to a secure VPN connection and whenever the clinician has time
• Through workgroups, allow other clinicians to review your referrals, e.g. when on holiday.

More information about how secondary care clinicians are using the Choose and Book system and the benefits they are realising can be found in the secondary care case studies under the Communications section of this website.