Lincolnshire LMC has generated a letter which practices can use when sending a patient to A&E.  Please use this form to indicate why you are sending the patient to A&E rather than admitting through another pathway.

When we assess a patient and decide that they require hospital admission it is best practice to discuss this referral with the appropriate specialist and arrange for the patient to be admitted to the appropriate admissions unit.  In recent times, however this has become more difficult.  There are now multiple pathways to admit patients, should we send the patient to medical admissions, SDEC, IAC, or whatever the current name is?   When we try to contact a specialist, we can spend hours waiting for switchboard to answer and then further hours waiting for the specialist to answer their pager.  And when we do speak to the specialist, they say “send the patient to A&E”.

What is even more frustrating is that GPs then get criticised for misusing A&E.

To counteract this we have developed a form which you can use to highlight why you are sending the patient to A&E.  This form highlights what why the patient is in A&E rather than an admissions unit.

Please continue to try to make the appropriate specialist referral but if you are unable to get hold of a specialist, or they advise you to send the patient to A&E, then please use this form, so that the patient gets seen by the appropriate specialist as quickly as possible.