GIC Referral Refusals

Reference: 24-25192

Date response sent: 23/08/2024

Details of enquiry

Over the last 48 hours, many trans people on the GIC waiting list have found a rejection message in their NHS app without any other notification through phone calls, letters or emails.  “A specialist at LONDON ADULT GENDER IDENTITY CLINIC – TAVISTOCK & PORTMAN NHSFT has reviewed your referral and advised your referrer to consider a different course of action.”

Please can you provide a breakdown of:

• -How many people have been sent this message.
• -Why other forms of communication like emails, letters or phone calls were not used.
• -A breakdown of how many messages like these were sent over the last five years by month.
• -A summary of the reasons behind the declining of these referrals.

Response sent

The Trust confirms that it does not currently hold the data to respond to the questions you have raised. This is because the NHS Electronic Referral System (ERS) went down for 3 days, and is still not fully functional.

The Trust is aware of the referral rejection messages to which you refer. These would appear to have been auto-generated by the ERS system, as the service was not aware, at the time, that these messages had been triggered.

The latest situation, at the time of writing, is that the ERS is up and running again, but we are still unable to access the reporting function, and consequently cannot view which patients have been rejected by the platform.

The third-party provider of the system has been asked to provide us with a diagnostic account of what happened and how this can be prevented in future, and this is still awaited. Any updates to this situation will be shared via our website.

We would really like to see copy of the messages that you quote, so, if you are willing, we would be grateful if you would kindly send us a copy – a screenshot would suffice, to enable us to narrow down the task with the platform provider.