Published 2 July 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b2692
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b2692

News

BMA meeting: the ban on consultant to consultant referrals must be lifted, doctors insist

Andrew Cole

1 Liverpool

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Some trusts are placing blanket bans on all consultant to consultant referrals and putting patients’ health at risk in the process, delegates at the Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) were told on Tuesday (30 June).

They voted overwhelmingly to seek to overturn this "simplistic prohibition" and to introduce national guidelines indicating when consultants could legitimately refer patients on to another specialist without referring back to the general practitioner.

GP Chaand Nagpaul from Edgware and Hendon said that although GP referral should be the normal course of action, direct referral between specialists was "entirely appropriate" in some circumstances, particularly when there was urgent medical need such as someone with suspected cancer or cardiac chest pain.

Referring a patient back to the GP in these cases could add weeks of delay that might adversely affect the patient’s health and risk the patient "being lost to referral altogether."

He described an elderly patient of . . . [Full text of this article]


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