Patient choice
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All parts of the NHS have an important role to play in delivering patient choice, which has been a regulatory requirement since 2012, collaborating across primary and secondary care to provide better care for patients. Enabling patients to make choices that better suit them, and their recovery, is something we can all support and much of which you will be very familiar with.
Enabling greater patient choice will require the NHS to respond in a number of ways, and the following sections outline the actions and activities within Primary Care, Secondary Care and ICBs.
Primary Care
Within Primary Care the key actions being taken to support choice, and actions that are required of primary care colleagues are:
- eRS functionality has been updated in March 2023 to create a single menu of service options. This will support referrers to see in one place, a wider variety of consultant-led services.
- We are asking all referrers to ensure they shortlist on average 5 choices from which the patient may choose, where this is practicable, clinically appropriate, and preferred by the patient. This will be enabled by new functionalities and should be based on conversations with the patient about their preferred selection criteria eg. waiting times, distance from their home or that of family members.
- Where they have access to technology, patients should be encouraged to use Manage Your Referral within eRS or the NHS App to choose their provider.
- Resources to support offering patients choice can be found at https://digital.nhs.uk/services/e-referral-service/helping-patients-manage-their-referral-online