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GIC Hormone Prescribing & Shared Care Record

Reference: 24-25289

Date response sent: 19/10/2024

Details of enquiry

  1. How many patients have received treatment on record at Gender Identity Clinic in each financial year from 2020/21 through to 2024
  2. How many patients on record at Gender Identity Clinic have been issued HRT prescriptions in the above mentioned time period?
  3. Does Gender Identity Clinic record when a patient’s GP does not want to enter into a shared care agreement to prescribe and monitor HRT?
  4. How many times were shared care agreements relating to HRT prescribing and monitoring refused in the above mentioned time period?

Response sent

  1. How many patients have received treatment on record at Gender Identity Clinic in each financial year from 2020/21 through to 2024

We have counted the number of distinct patients per financial year (April to March), who attended either single GIC appointments and/or GIC group sessions.  These are as follows:

1-Apr 20 – 31-Mar 21: 3,363 patients

1-Apr 21 – 31-Mar 22: 4,162 patients

1-Apr 22 – 31-Mar 23: 3,868 patients

1-Apr 23 – 31-Mar 24: 3,834 patients

  1. How many patients on record at Gender Identity Clinic have been issued HRT prescriptions in the above mentioned time period?

We do not hold this data.

The Endocrinology Team at the Trust’s GIC do not issue prescriptions for hormone therapy. Where assessed as appropriate, the endocrinologist would write to the patient’s GP recommending that they prescribe hormone therapy for the patient, but the Trust does not routinely receive information that patients have received these prescriptions.

Please note that the Freedom of Information Act 2000 applies only to recorded information that exists at the time of the request.  It does not require an authority to questions where this would involve the creation of new information, and this could only be answered by creating new information

  1. Does Gender Identity Clinic record when a patient’s GP does not want to enter into a shared care agreement to prescribe and monitor HRT?

Where notified, this would be recorded on the patient’s file, and the GIC would write again to the GP advising them to issue the prescription.

  1. How many times were shared care agreements relating to HRT prescribing and monitoring refused in the above mentioned time period?

We can confirm that this is a frequent occurrence, which would be entered as freetext within the notes sections of a patient’s electronic record.  This would not be in an electronically retrievable field format, (ie there is no automated mechanism for the collation of the required data).  To extract this data, where held, would require manual review and the processing of a large volume of data, considerably exceeding the limit to time and resource provisioned under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).

The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 has set the appropriate limit as £450 based on a generic charge of £25 per hour to determine whether the Trust holds the information, to locate, and then to extract it). Section 12 of FOIA further states that the authority (ie this Trust) is not obligated to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the costs of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.

We have estimated that to obtain the requested information, where held, would therefore require a manual search of all patient records amounting to thousands of electronic patient records, which, at an estimated 15 minutes per record would take approximately 250 hours per thousand records.

This means that as the time required to process this question falls outside the cost limit, and is refused and exempt from disclosure under SECTION 12 of FOIA.

 

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