The NHS Vale of York CCG has worked with York Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and 5 pilot practice sites to produce electronic referrals for Radiology. The use of electronic referrals is supported by NHS England, who have challenged the NHS to become paperless by 2018.

Please take note of the following information:

• GMC number and name must be included on all referrals from GPs and non-medical referrer agreed short code must be included on all referrals from a Nurse Practitioner (you will have this if you have taken the appropriate training) or they will be returned.
  The GMC/short code is required on these forms in place of your signature. This is a legal requirement under the Ionising Radiations (Medical Exposures) Regulations 2000 that all referrals requesting radiation be correctly authorised by the referring clinician. The Trust is entitled to reject incomplete requests, as it states at the top of each form.

• The referral should either be sent by referrer from a practice nhs.net e-mail account or sent to the admin team within the practice to send via a practice nhs.net email account. Please ensure this account is regularly monitored, in case the trust needs to make any queries or reject the referral.
  Referrals should not be sent from personal nhs.net e-mail accounts, as the hospital may need to clarify something on the referral or reject it and if you are on annual leave or away from the practice for any reason this will delay the patients treatment. If you chose to send referrals from personal nhs.net email accounts, as they are generated from within your clinical system, please ensure your practice email address is on the referral form and is on your out-of-office message too, so the trust can easily contact the practice if they need to.
  It is the clinical responsibility of the referring clinician to ensure that the hospital can contact you if they need to query or reject the referral. If referrals are sent from your nhs.net account you must ensure that you are checking them on a regular basis.

• Appropriate email destination address chosen dependent upon where the patient requires the procedure to be completed. The table below indicates which email to use, which sites are covered by each email address and a summary of the services available.

• Referrals should not be sent in hard copy via the post or by fax in addition to sending via email. This is to ensure procedures are not duplicated. If you have any queries about outstanding referrals, please use the contact numbers included on the referral cards.
• Plain X-Ray Open Access at York, Scarborough and Bridlington Hospitals: patients, who wish to use this service, must continue to bring a hard copy referral with them to the x-ray department. This referral can be completed electronically with printed name and GMC number included, rather than having a hand-written signature and then be printed out. Scarborough and Bridlington Hospitals service is open 9am to 4pm Monday-Friday.
  *Only if a patient needs a pre-booked x-ray appointment, should the referral be sent in by email.
• For reassurance, some clinicians have applied a read receipt for confirmation that the e-mailed request has been received and opened.
• The reports for these requests will continue to come back to your practice how they always have done – we have not changed this process.
• If you have any issues with these request forms please contact helpdesk on 0345 140 8000 or via IT_ServiceDesk@embedhealth.co.uk

Primary Care CT Scan Referrals

As of 9^th April 2018, we are changing our protocol for CT examinations requiring intravenous contrast (IV) agents.  This is being done to adopt best practice following consultation with Royal College of Radiologists guidance and our Medicines Management Team, in order to ensure that we are not putting patients at increased risk of contrast nephropathy.

From this date, all patients requiring IV contrast for CT will have to have a Creatinine and eGFR result that has been done within 3 months of the date of the scan.  The maximum wait from referral to scan would be 6 weeks, so this needs factoring in to when the blood tests are done. 

If the patient is sent for a blood test on the date of the referral, this should be indicated on the referral, and we (Radiology) will check for the results.  As GP surgeries have developed their own electronic referral, I have attached a copy of the updated paper request for clarification.

Examinations not requiring IV contrast are unaffected.  Currently, these are:

• CT KUB
• CT sinuses
• CT head (unless looking for metastases)
• HRCT of the chest
• Orthopaedic CT

Please click here for the Primary Care CT Scan Referral Form

MRI spinal request form - (word version)

SystmOne Forms

• MRI Spinal request form
• MRI e-request
• NM e-request
• US e-request
• XR e-request

EMIS Web Forms

• MRI Spinal request form
• MRI e-request
• NM e-request
• US e-request
• XR e-request

For guidance about how to download these forms please click here.

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