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Advice and Guidance (Endocrinology)

Checked: 23-01-2023 by Rob Adams Next Review: 23-01-2024

Overview

From 23/01/23 the Endocrinologists at UHBW and NBT will offer Advice and Guidance via eReferral. These services should be utilised where advice is required on the management of a patient (16 years or older) that may avoid the need for referral.

Please check Remedy guidelines before using this service in case the advice you require is already available.

These services should not be used where immediate advice is required, in which case the on call teams should be contacted in the usual way.

This service should not be used for queries about diabetes - please see the Diabetes Advice and Guidance page.

****Update January 2024**** - UHBW endocrinology advice and guidance is currently experiencing high pressure and current waits for a response are approximately 12 weeks. See Hospital waiting times for further updates.

Advice and Guidance

All requests should be submitted directly to the Endocrinology Advice & Guidance Service at either UHBW or NBT using e-RS.

Before using this service please ensure you have gone through the guidance available on Remedy first and check the list of exclusions below:

Exclusions:

Second opinion
Progressing/expediting an existing referral
Diabetes
Patients known to Endocrinology in NBT/UHBW

To enable the consultants to give the best advice possible please consider the following points:

Give a clear concise history and examination findings- avoid cutting and pasting long lists of consultation notes that are not relevant to the problem in hand.
Include relevant results, investigations and recent correspondence if appropriate but avoid multiple attachments that can take time to download and make the triage process more cumbersome.
Ask a clear clinical question and avoid ambiguity.
Avoid requests for complex patients known to an individual consultant as they are unlikely to be the consultant giving the advice and may not have easy access to details of previous contacts with the patient. In these cases consider writing or emailing the relevant secretary directly.

Please note: Referrals to endocrinology outpatients via eRS may be clinically triaged by the BNSSG ICB Referral Service. If considered appropriate for advice and guidance by one of the GP triagers, these referrals may be returned to the referrer to consider this option.

Efforts are made to ensure the accuracy and agreement of these guidelines, including any content uploaded, referred to or linked to from the system. However, BNSSG ICB cannot guarantee this. This guidance does not override the individual responsibility of healthcare professionals to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual patient, in consultation with the patient and/or guardian or carer, in accordance with the mental capacity act, and informed by the summary of product characteristics of any drugs they are considering. Practitioners are required to perform their duties in accordance with the law and their regulators and nothing in this guidance should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with compliance with those duties.

Information provided through Remedy is continually updated so please be aware any printed copies may quickly become out of date.