Right to choose
What is it?
If you are registered with a GP in England and they refer you to a consultant or specialist doctor, you have the legal right to choose your provider.
- Right to Choose (RTC) is not currently available in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. If you move out of England during your treatment, you will no longer be eligible for RTC.
- The organisation you choose must be a ‘qualified provider’.
In the current climate it is understandable that some patients are exercising their ‘right to choose’ and requesting referral to independent providers who hold an NHS contract with ICB’s. Some providers are advertising NHS assessment and shorter waiting times.
Patients choosing such services should be mindful that some services will only diagnose and will not prescribe or provide the secondary care part of a shared care arrangement. This should be taken into account by the patient when making their decision of whether it is appropriate to refer to those providers only making a diagnosis in terms of what the patient is hoping for as an outcome.
Patients should check before they decide to exercise their Right to choose, that their GP will enter into a shared care agreement with the provider.
A shared care agreement is a formal agreement between your GP and a specialist within the NHS. It allows your GP to take over the prescribing and monitoring of medication, typically after a specialist has diagnosed a condition and stabilised the treatment. This ensures you can conveniently access your prescriptions and monitoring locally.
The NHS right to choose pathway allows you to choose which NHS approved mental health provider you would like to be referred to for assessment and treatment of certain conditions, such as ADHD or autism. This choice is available to you if your GP agrees a referral is clinically necessary, but you find the waiting times within the local NHS too long, or for other personal reasons.
Some of the providers on the right to choose pathway are private organisations. Its important to understand that these private providers must also offer NHS services to be part of the right to choose pathway. The care they deliver through this pathway is commissioned and funded by the NHS.
At Highfield surgery, we do not enter into shared care agreements with private providers, even those participating in the right to choose pathway. This means we cannot prescribe or provide tests requested by these private providers. If you choose to be seen by a private provider under right to choose, you will need to discuss your prescription and monitoring needs with them directly and the ongoing care and responsibility for prescriptions and monitoring will stay with the private provider who assessed you. We will continue to provide your other NHS primary care services
