The Booking Process

When a referral is received from primary care, the service determines if it has the capacity to deliver an assessment within six months and advises the patient and general practitioner (GP) accordingly.

Following assessment, a decision is made as to whether or not the patient would benefit from treatment.  Treatment cannot be provided to every patient.  A process of prioritisation ranks patients against others with a similar condition.  The funded capacity of a service determines how many patients (in order of priority) can be accepted into the secondary system, accorded a specific status and managed according to the status assigned.

The possible statuses are:

• Booked or certainty - these are for those patients with the highest priority (booked - actual date given; certainty - date to follow).  The number in booked or certainty should be determined by the capacity of the service to provide treatment within the next six months. 
• Active review - this is for the patients who would next receive treatment if provider capacity were to increase.
  While in the category of active review, patients should receive a clinical assessment every six months. If their condition remains unchanged by the time of the third assessment, they may be returned to the care of their GP.

The Ministry of Health have eight Elective Service Patient Flow Indicators (ESPIs) that focus on key points in this booking process.

The ESPI results for each DHB are available monthly on a public website