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GIC Referrals April 2017 to Sept 2023

Reference: 23-24315

Date response sent: 22/11/2023

Details of enquiry

Please may I request the following information, with regards to the (adult) Gender Identity Clinic;

  1. The total number of referrals to date that have been removed from the waiting list as the patients in question have been transferred to one of the NHS England pilot clinics, broken down by each pilot clinic 
    1. (for the avoidance of doubt, these are TransPlus (London), Indigo (Manchester), CMAGIC (Cheshire and Merseyside), East of England Gender Service (East of England) and Sussex Gender Service (Sussex))
  2. The number of referrals received, broken down by month of initial referral, from April 2017 to September 2023
    1. (while this has been released in previous published requests, such as ref 22-23103, I believe that updated data has not been released since)
  3. The number of referrals currently held on the waiting list (i.e. not transferred to a pilot), broken down by month of initial referral, from April 2017 to September 2023
  4. With regards to the waiting list,
    1. The total number of referrals eligible to transfer to the Sussex Gender Service (that is, those referrals with a GP located in Sussex and referral date up to and including 31/03/23), broken down by month of initial referral
      1. for those that have yet to be transferred
      2. and for those already transferred, if the data is still held

Response sent

  1. The total number of referrals to date that have been removed from the waiting list as the patients in question have been transferred to one of the NHS England pilot clinics, broken down by each pilot clinic. 

 

We confirm that this data is held by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust.  However this data is qualitative and held in individual patient files therefore not amenable to formulae that extracts this data electronically, as there were no dedicated fields to capture this data available before late September 2023.

Obtaining the requested data at this time would therefore necessitate a manual search of all discharged patient files from April 2020 to date.  We estimate that searching each patient file, locating and extracting this data would take approximately 10 minutes.  Per thousand files this would take around 16 hours.  Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act makes provision for NHS organisations to refuse requests for information where the cost of processing (which includes determining whether the Trust holds the information, locating, and then extracting it) exceeds £450, or 18 hours of work from one member of staff.

 

As such, the  time required to manually process this question falls outside this limit. The question is therefore refused according to the provision in the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).

To remedy this, we are currently embarking upon exercises with each of the five pilot clinics to validate data on all consented referrals transferring from this Trust’s GIC.  We will then use this data to populate and maintain the new functional fields within our EHR, thereby enabling us, in the future, to electronically report patient numbers transferred to each of them, and consequently discharged from our waiting list.  We cannot commit to a date when this work will complete but anticipate that this will take several months. There is an intention, once we are assured of the fidelity of this data, to publish this on our website.

 

Whilst the exact data you have requested cannot currently be provided, for the above reasons, we have produced a table below, which may be of interest to you.  It shows the numbers of indicative referrals from our waiting list who may have consented to transfer to the pilot clinic waiting lists, subject to the data validation process.

 

Pilot GIC Clinics Service Start Date Number of patients transferred as at 13/11/23
Sussex Gender Services Sept ‘23 52
TransPlus July ‘20 636
CMAGIC April ‘21 77
Indigo Gender Service Dec ‘20 56
East of England Gender Service June ‘21 1481
Total:   2,250

 

  1. The number of referrals received, broken down by month of initial referral, from April 2017 to September 2023

 

Please note that the statistics provided in FOI 22-23103, to which you refer in sub section a) of this question does not relate to the (adult) Gender Identity Clinic.  FOI 22-23103 relates, in its entirety, to another service, namely the Trust’s Children and Young People’s service GIDS (Gender Identity Development Service), which is unrelated to this request, and therefore not addressed in this response.

The requested data for the Adults GIC service is as follows:

 

  1. The number of referrals currently held on the waiting list (i.e. not transferred to a pilot), broken down by month of initial referral, from April 2017 to September 2023

This data is publicly available and shown on our website and regularly updated:  Waiting times – Gender Identity Clinic – GIC  It is currently showing that at the end of September 14,152 people were on the GIC waiting list.

 

 

  1. With regards to the waiting list,

a. The total number of referrals eligible to transfer to the Sussex Gender Service (that is, those referrals with a GP located in Sussex and referral date up to and including 31/03/23), broken down by month of initial referral

i. for those that have yet to be transferred

1261 referrals are eligible for transfer, subject to patient consent.  These are shown in the table below, broken down by month/year of initial referral.

 

ii. and for those already transferred, if the data is still held

52 referrals have consented and have been transferred.

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