Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to encourage NHS organisations to allow patients to book appointments online.

Working with the Department, NHS England’s vision is to transform health and care services to help citizens make the right health and care choices for them. The ability for people to choose and make appointments online is an integral part of this vision.

Over the last two years NHS England has been working with general practice to drive forward the capability for online booking.

The patient online programme that has been run by NHS England has meant that now over 97% of general practitioner (GP) practices now offer access to online booking/cancelling of appointments to their patients. This is an outstanding achievement and there is a clear potential to do more and deliver substantial benefits to patients and practices.

11% of patients are now registered for online appointment booking. In quarter one of 2015/16, 2.3 million appointments were booked /cancelled online.

NHS England has been supporting general practices by providing tools and resources, which have been developed jointly with the Royal College of General Practitioners. There is also on the ground support available from experienced change specialists and practicing clinicians (Digital Clinical Champions) working with the Patient Online programme.

NHS England is also actively encouraging patients to request online services, starting with the upcoming Fresher’s week campaign in September 2015.

The evolution of Choose and Book to the NHS e-Referral Service (eRS) in June of this year maintained the ability for patients to choose the provider for a referral to elective care and the option to book change or amend their secondary care appointment online.

The commitments made through the National Information Board for the electronic referral system in support of elective care will widen the capability and allow use of other technology such as phone apps to support patients in booking hospital appointments while on the move. The system will also support online booking of appointments into community type services, such as those provided by community nurses and Allied Healthcare Professionals.

For primary care we have established a dedicated programme that will:

- provide citizens with a greater choice and flexibility in finding and booking appointments with the most appropriate service, and with the ability to edit/ cancel/ change appointments. This will be expanded to cover specialist services and nurse led clinics;

- digital interaction and communication channels will become part of the embedded mechanism to manage demand and signpost to appropriate services;

- enable citizens to communicate with their GP or ‘multi-disciplinary team’ via online communications at their own convenience;

- provide citizens the ability to (following the initial primary care decision to refer) book and manage their secondary care appointments online, including the ability to cancel and reschedule appointments after an initial appointment has been made and the ability to switch to an alternative provider; and

- provide the ability for the online registration and facility to change GP.

NHS Choices will be transformed into a multi-channel platform for the whole health and care system, “nhs.uk”, will provide a single access point for citizens, in time, NHS England would expect that this would become the door to online health, care accounts as well as online appointment booking.