In collaboration with the British Society of Gastroenterology and the Primary Care Society for Gastroenterology and Hepatology, GIRFT has developed an advice and guidance (A&G) toolkit to support GP decision-making aided by guidance from specialist gastroenterology teams.
A&G, also known as Specialist Advice Services, enables GPs to seek timely advice from secondary care specialists. It helps to enhance communication and collaboration between primary and secondary care and reduce unnecessary delays.
The new toolkit, now available on the GIRFT FutureNHS workspace, contains templates for secondary care clinicians to respond to requests from GPs about common gastroenterology conditions. It offers customisable templates enabling hospital clinicians to provide tailored responses to GPs on patient-specific queries.
GIRFT brought together a working group of clinicians from primary and secondary care and also patient representatives to develop the templates. The aim is to ensure they are helpful to the specialists providing the advice and to the GPs receiving them, with patient-accessible content to support communication of advice to patients.
The toolkit offers guidance on managing ten of the most common gastrointestinal conditions, including constipation, chronic diarrhoea, irritable bowel syndrome, and abnormal liver function tests (LFTs). The ‘response’ templates aim to improve the timeliness and quality of responses back to GPs and include useful standard information alongside customisable sections that can be adapted for specific advice tailored to the GP’s query, with suggested actions.
"This new resource makes it easier for primary care colleagues to obtain clinical advice from gastroenterology specialists in secondary care, which means that patients can have a specialist management decision made at an earlier stage of their care. The use of templates supports a quicker response from specialists and helps inform decision-making with patients at the pre-referral stage.”
