Self Referral Success in East of England and London

Allied Health Professionals Suffolk developed and implemented digital self-referral for MSK physiotherapy over 10 years ago. Patients are encouraged to take control of their care by completing their referral and being sent tailored advice and guidance by a clinician within 1 working day. This saves appointments and administrative burden in primary care.

Early intervention in MSK conditions is known to improve clinical outcomes and self-referral supports this, not only through rapid tailored advice but also allowing service to triage inbound referrals to maximise their resources. In Suffolk this has been used to achieve waiting times below 4 weeks for all MSK patients and that patients require fewer appointments in each episode of care if they self-refer into the service. The Suffolk MSK physiotherapy service receive more than 75% of their referrals via self-referral.

Continued development and use of the bespoke self-referral platform for community services has led this method being adopted by services in Norfolk, Essex, and North London making it available to over 2 million individuals. This includes non-MSK specialities such as pulmonary rehabilitation, pelvic health physiotherapy, perinatal pelvic health physiotherapy and podiatry. The platform handles over 80,000 referrals annually.

Patient, primary care and comissioner feedback is overwhelmingly positive and the bespoke self-referral platform includes a telephone service for patients without internet access. The site is highly accessible and includes the option to self-refer in over 100 languages, which are translated for clinical triage by an artificial intelligence translation engine with a medical dictionary and responses are translated back into the referrers spoken language.

Thanks to support from NHS Digital and NHS X the self-referral platform is interoperable with the Organisation Data Service and Patient Demographic Service. Ensuring correct details of patients and services from national databases. Future developments for 2023 include the introduction of the NHS app login to the platform meaning patients can make use of the single sign on functionality.