Hospital appointments, postage costs and attendance figures (FOI)

Request

A

Please advise the number of appointments made on an annual basis including, in and outpatients initial and rebooked appointments.

B

Please confirm if Health and Community Services pays full postage or if it receives a discount.

C

What is the latest estimate of attendances at the Accident and Emergency Unit and what percentage should be attending a General Practioner (GP)?

D

What financial action is being taken to encourage those who should be seeing a GP so to do?

Response

A

There were 10,006 elective Inpatient or Day Case admissions to the Jersey General Hospital in 2022.

Data Source: Hospital Patient Administration System (TrakCare, Inpatient Admissions Report ATD5L)

269,452 General and Acute Outpatient appointments are recorded in the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) for 2022 as appointments booked, attended, not attended, and those cancelled, excluding booking errors that do not represent actual appointments and would not generate a patient notification.

In addition to the above, 75,939 appointments have a status of ‘Transferred’ logged against them. A transfer may be a clinic room or clinician change, rather than a change of appointment. It is not possible to discern how many ‘Transferred’ cases relate to rescheduled appointments, as no distinction can be drawn from the data available in the EPR in use at the time.

Data Source: Hospital Patient Administration System (TrakCare, Outpatient Activity Report BKG1A)

B

The Government of Jersey, including Health and Community Services (HCS), pays business rates for postage. 

C

Monthly Emergency Department attendance figures are published on www.gov.je in HCS’ Quality and Performance Report:

Health and Community Services Quality and Performance Reports (gov.je)

As this information is available elsewhere, Article 23 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has been applied.

For the period January to April 2023 inclusive, 17% of Emergency Department attendances were categorised as ‘Primary Care’ in the EPR diagnosis field. Validated data is not yet available for the period following the implementation of the new EPR in May 2023.

D

HCS do not charge for Emergency Department attendances. The Residents and Non-Residents Charging Policy is available on www.gov.je:

Resident and Non-resident Charging Policy.pdf (gov.je)

Under the Health Access Scheme, G.P. services are provided to eligible individuals at a reduced fixed cost. Details of the scheme and eligibility criteria are available through www.gov.je:

Health Access Scheme (gov.je)

Alongside the Health Access Scheme, the Government of Jersey and local G.P. practices have recently agreed a reduction in costs for face-to-face G.P. appointments for adults, and free face-to-face G.P. appointments for all children and young people (under 18 years of age) through the Health Insurance Fund, as announced by the Minister for Social Security and detailed on www.gov.je:

Minister reduces cost of a General Practitioner (GP) appointment by £20 (gov.je)

Free GP appointments for children (gov.je)

Article applied

Article 23 - Information accessible to applicant by other means

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it is reasonably available to the applicant, otherwise than under this Law, whether or not free of charge.

(2) A scheduled public authority that refuses an application for information on this ground must make reasonable efforts to inform the applicant where the applicant may obtain the information.