Urgent Referral Pathway: How to schedule Urgent Referral messages to a patient
Pathways allow you to schedule a series of messages for a patient.
🤔 What is the Urgent Referral Pathway?
The Urgent Referral Pathway is a series of two messages that you can send to patients who have been referred by your practice to see a specialist on the two-week-wait pathway.
Message 1 lets the patient know that they have been referred to the hospital for an urgent appointment, and lets them know that they should receive an appointment from the hospital within 2 weeks.
Message 2 is automatically sent 2 weeks later and reminds the patient that they should have received a hospital appointment, and asks them to contact the GP practice if they haven't yet received this appointment.
Both messages include a link to a page on the Macmillan website with more information.
Please note: Although the Cancer Waiting Times have changed with the introduction of the Faster Diagnosis Standard (FDS), we understand that the general advice to GPs is to continue to advise their patients that they should still be seen within 2 weeks. For this reason, we aren't planning on changing the wording in the Urgent Referral Pathway for now. We will continue to review this over the coming months, in close discussion with Macmillan who have been involved in the development of this Pathway.
Step-by-step guide on how to set this up for a patient
👉 Step 1: On EMIS or SystmOne, open the relevant patient you want to schedule the Urgent Referral pathway for. You will need to have the Accurx toolbar open too (the green toolbar in the screenshot).
👉 Step 2: With the relevant patient open on EMIS or SystmOne, click on the ‘Message’ icon on the Accurx toolbar. This is the button you use to send a normal text message or Florey questionnaire to a patient. This will open the Compose screen.
👉 Step 3: From the Compose screen, click on ‘Search for a template or questionnaire’ and type in the word 'Urgent'. The template titled "Urgent referral in 2 weeks", under the Referral reminders heading, is the pathway with the scheduled second message after two weeks. Select this second template titled “Urgent referral in 2 weeks”.
👉 Step 4: This will open the Urgent Referral pathway template. You can see both messages in the series and edit them if you like.
📅 You can also change the date and/or time that the messages will be sent by clicking on the date and time button in blue text.
👉 Step 5: When you’re happy with the two messages, click “Send and schedule all” to send the first message to the patient and schedule the second message to send automatically in two weeks' time.
📖 What is the content of the messages?
Below are screenshots showing the content of the messages. Remember that you can edit them if you like ✏️
ℹ️ Some additional info
For messages scheduled in the future, we run a check to make sure the patient is still registered at the practice and their details have not changed. If a patient has died or moved, we'll automatically cancel any future messages to that patient.
If a message is scheduled to a patient in the future and they change their mobile number before the message is sent, the message will be delivered to their new mobile number.
You can cancel scheduled messages by going to your toolbar menu, clicking 'Manage Organisation', then selecting 'All Messages', and 'Scheduled'. From there, click cancel next to the message you wish to cancel.
Currently, you can't make your own custom pathway templates.