Key Objectives
- Improve patient experience when when making a booking
- Single contact patient journey
- Reduce unnecessary Emergency Department attendance
- Meet key recommendations made within the FYFV that the booking standard program is committed to delivering including:
- Ensuring there is capability across all STPs for bookings at GP practices – initially delivered through existing capability in the market but ultimately through open, standardised methods from December 2018
- Enabling Urgent Treatment Centres to offer appointments bookable through 111 as well as GP referral, will be treating patients from Spring 2019
- Enabling NHS 111 to book people into urgent face to face appointments where needed
- All services can support electronic booking directly between services
Approach
This standard is being developed in a collaborative and agile way. Therefore, the standards and specifications will evolve, especially during first private beta deployments.
Working in conjunction with GP Connect
The GP Connect (GPC) programme has already developed a core national specification setting the standard for various capabilities including direct booking of electronic appointments between GP systems.
For appointment booking from GP to GP or 111 to GP the GPC standard should be referred to and can be found here. The GPC team are currently working with several suppliers to develop against the standard and to run pilots trialling various functionality set out by the GPC specification including booking appointments between GP Federations.