More than 6,000 appointments a week are now being made through Choose and Book with the total number of bookings now over 52,000, Jane Cummings, the national director for C&B, has revealed.
Speaking at a conference organised by the Health Service Journal, Ms Cummings said this was a marked improvement on July when just 100 appointments a week were being made through C&B.
"There has been an exponential growth in bookings,” said Ms Cummings. “There’s a big improvement although not as much as we would like,” she added.
It was initially envisaged that all first-time-out patient appointments would be booked via C&B by the end of this month – 9.5 million a year or 182,000 a week.
The government abandoned this target in the autumn when it became clear that PCTs would not meet the October 31 2005 milestone of booking 50 per cent of appointments electronically. No further targets have been set so far.
Although the conference was upbeat about C&B with several project leads reporting excellent feedback from GPs about the reliability of the system and patients about its ease and convenience, Ms Cummings admitted that technical challenges remain. One of these was the continued problem of integrating existing GP systems with C&B and secondary care systems. “Lots of problems keep coming up,” she said.
She acknowledged that this was undermining confidence in the system, adding that GP engagement was still an issue as a result.
The capacity of local IT teams also remained a question, she added, although the technical support teams put in place in the autumn by the national programme had proved very successful.
Choose and Book is now live in 261 (86% of ) primary care trusts and 1,863 GP (23% of) practices, although not every GP in every live practice is using the system. Similarly 90 per cent of GPs are registered to use the system although not all have done so.
Some 60 per cent of practices have now ordered IT upgrades that will provide the fully integrated C&B.
On the provider side, 145 NHS trusts (83%) and three Nuffield Hospitals are now accepting bookings from C&B. Out of the NHS trusts, 58 per cent are using Indirectly Bookable Service (IBS).
The number of bookings within each PCT varies widely, said Ms Cummings. The leader – Durham Dales PCT – is now making 64 per cent of bookings through C&B while other live PCTs have booked fewer than 100 appointments in total.
There were lots of factors in uptake, ranging from PCTs implementing a “big bang” approach through to the level of support offered to practices. The most successful project leads were those who were out and about, meeting practice staff.
She said: “GPs will use the system if they have lots of choices and lots of things to book into. Consultants will do it if they have lots of clinics and lots of GPs using the system.”
The importance of having a good quality directory of services was also becoming clear as PCTs learn more about C&B she added. “In some places it is being re-written to reflect more closely what GPs want to see and what consultants want to describe and how best they can describe them to make sure patients get referred to the right consultant at the right time.” The national team is looking at developing some guidance on this issue, she said.
Version 2.3 Choose and Book went live this weekend. It promised to solve a number of niggles for GPs, said Dr Mark Davies, national clinical lead for choose and book.
“A number of usability changes have been made,” Dr Davies told EHI Primary Care. For example, the system will allow users to paste the NHS number and autopopulate the relevant fields, and allow users to paste into the UBRN field.
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