NHS England South (South East) Dental Electronic Referral Service

The NHS England South, (South East) is supported by Dental Public Health advice from Public Health England, who has provided service evaluations of the Intermediate Minor Oral Surgery Service and the Endodontic Service for Kent. The recommendations from those evaluations indicate the need to improve referral systems and processes. This is consistent with the vision of the NHS e-referral service set out by NHS England.

Across Kent, Medway, Surrey and Sussex, a range of referral management and referral administration services are in place for dental services. These are mixture of legacy systems from PCTs, such as the Primary Care Booking Service in Kent as well as provider managed processes. A rapid review of referral processes, systems and forms across Kent, Medway, Surrey and Sussex has identified that a variety of processes exist in each area with varying degrees of clinical triage depending on the type of service. Some of those legacy administrative services are soon due to cease, such as the Oral Surgery Primary Care Booking Service and the Endodontic Referral Administration Service in Kent.

At present we know that waiting times vary across specialised services ; that the quality of referrals are variable resulting in inconsistent acceptance of cases and therefore difference in access to services. Waiting times for treatment between secondary care and community based services differ potentially resulting in inefficiency and inequality.

The current system poses operational commissioning challenges making it difficult to assess service need and define future commissioning intentions; it is also challenging to monitor the quality of services. With the development of the Dental Assurance Framework there is a greater need to improve the quality of reporting information. The NHS is challenged to deliver high quality care for all. A more reliable and efficient referral system it needed to support local practitioners.

Therefore NHS England has commissioned a Dental Electronic Referral Service that can manage all dental referrals for NHS dental services within Kent, Medway, Surrey and Sussex. The overall aims of the service are to: • Provide clinicians with a single mechanism to refer patients that require specialist and specialised NHS dental services; • Improve the quality of referrals in order to support effective triage; • Enable patients to access care that is most suited to their needs; • Improve the efficiency of the referral process; • Provide accurate referral information to support clinical service evaluation and development; and • Achieve value for money.