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Advice & Referrals - Infectious Diseases and Microbiology

Checked: 10-05-2024 by Rob Adams Next Review: 10-05-2026

Infectious Diseases

The Infectious Disease service operates in partnership with the microbiology teams across both acute Trusts. Details are available at:

Infectious Diseases - For Clinicians | North Bristol NHS Trust (nbt.nhs.uk)

Advice and guidance

Please use eRS for Advice and Guidance regarding semi/non-urgent advice (turnaround 2 working days). Topics include but are not limited to:

Travel advice including non-acute post-travel illness
Guidance on investigations recommended in the work up of an illness that may be caused by a non-acute infection
If you wish to discuss the benefit of a clinic referral.

Advice requests should ideally be typed into the free text window on e-RS rather than attaching a separate letter or Word document. If you attach a Clinical Information Summary, please ensure it is named this, so that clinicians at secondary care can opt to look at it if they wish to turn the request into a referral.

Please see Infectious Diseases - NBT for instructions on how to complete a request through eRS.

Infectious Diseases Referral

Referrals for clinic appointments should be made to General Infectious Diseases / Tropical Medicine RAS via eRS. Referrals are reviewed by the team every working day and triaged to appropriate clinic or returned with advice.

If you believe someone should be seen within a week please also contact the admin team (IDadmin@nbt.nhs.uk) for the purposes of highlighting the referral.

If someone should be seen urgently but not necessarily admitted – e.g. fever in an otherwise well returning traveller – please contact the Infectious Diseases Registrar via Southmead Hospital switchboard for same day review on SDEC.

Referrals for TB are managed via a separate pathway - see the Tuberculosis page.

Microbiology

Advice can be obtained via phone for urgent concerns or email for non-urgent advice for queries such as:

Antimicrobial choices
Bacteriology result interpretation or queries

Please contact the appropriate trust department as detailed in the sections below.

NBT Microbiology

Urgent/same day clinical advice

Please call: 0117 4146222 (option 2 then option 1). Monday -Friday 09:00-17:00.

Outside of these hours for urgent advice please call the Microbiology Spr via NBT switchboard

Non-urgent clinical advice

Please email: NBTMicroClinicalAdvice@nbt.nhs.uk (expected turnaround time of 24 hours the next working day).

UHBW (Bristol) Microbiology

All Microbiology clinical advice enquiries to go through 0117 4146222 (option 1 then option 1 again)

Monday -Friday 09:00-17:00.

Outside of these hours for urgent advice please call the Microbiology Spr via UHBW switchboard

UHBW (Weston) Microbiology

Urgent Enquiries

Please call: 01934 881304. Monday -Friday 09:00-17:00.

Outside of these hours for urgent advice please call the Microbiology Spr via WGH switchboard.

Non- Urgent Enquiries

Please email: WGHClinicalMicrobiology@uhbw.nhs.uk (expected turnaround time of 24 hours the next working day).

Please see attached document for further details: wgh-micro-contact-details-vs2.pdf (icb.nhs.uk)

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.