New standards for hospitals over GP referral letters

STANDARDS governing communications between GPs and hospitals have been announced to preventing a repeat of the debacle at Tallaght hospital where thousands of GP referral letters went unanswered.

The Health Information Quality Authority said the General Practice Messaging Standard will ensure all correspondence sent electronically by GPs to acute services is handled properly.

The GPMS will be technical standards that outline the way patient information, ranging from blood test results, diagnosis, referrals and X-rays, can be accurately and safely transferred between healthcare services.

When a referral is sent electronically, the GP and patient will know when it has arrived and when an appointment is made.

Notification will be sent to GPs if patients fail to attend for appointments and GPs will be notified when patients are discharged from hospital.

Hiqa director Prof Jane Grimson said the standards would bring transparency to the relationship between GPs and hospitals.

"In essence, when these standards are in place and a patient is referred by the GP to a hospital consultant or for diagnostics, the GP will know, and hence the patient will also know where the referral is in the system," she said.

"This is a significant development for patient safety in Ireland. Messaging standards provide the basis for ensuring that vital information about the patient is available when it is needed."

The realisation that letters sent by GPs to the radiology department at Tallaght hospital were not opened or went unanswered for years in some cases has focused attention on the manner in which referral letters are dealt with by hospitals.

The standards will only deal with electronic correspondence between GPs and the health service, but the authority is hoping it will become the norm for the medical sector as a whole.

The standards are based on those developed in the US more than 20 years ago.