Ronny Cheung, GIRFT’s paediatric advisor and a consultant general paediatrician at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, led the GIRFT working group developing the toolkit, which saw clinicians from primary and secondary care coming together to develop the templates to ensure they are helpful to both the specialists using them and the GPs receiving them.
“A&G can play a key role in ensuring that children and families are supported most effectively, supporting GPs in providing optimum care closer to home. The templates in our toolkit provide a starting point for an evidence-based conversation between clinicians working in primary and secondary care, to support a child- and family-centred approach to delivering high quality care, whilst minimising unnecessary and inefficient outpatient activity.”
A&G, also known as Specialist Advice Services, allows GPs to obtain advice from specialists in secondary care, which means families get a decision and advice on their child’s suspected condition more quickly than waiting to see a specialist in the outpatient department.
The GIRFT toolkit offers tips on making optimal use of A&G and includes templates which can be adapted in response to A&G requests for 20 common children and young people’s conditions, including abdominal pain, undescended testes and faltering growth.
The colour-coded templates aim to improve the timeliness and quality of responses back to GPs, allowing a personalised response which is tailored to the individual child’s presentation, with the most important information clearly highlighted and scope for local processes and requirements to be flagged.
The templates for CYP services are the second in a series GIRFT is working on, with A&G templates for urology already available and others for dermatology, ENT and gynaecology also being developed.
