Expedite Letters

You may have noticed that following the Covid-19 pandemic, NHS wait times for NHS outpatient appointments have markedly. On contacting their local hospital, patients, whose symptoms have worsened, are frequently told to contact their GP for an “expedite letter”. Unfortunately, this seldom results in appointments being progressed more urgently, since a secondary care team has a final say when the referral is triaged, this is the case whether the referral sent by your GP was marked as “routine” or “urgent”

Moreover, your GP will find it increasingly difficult to measure the extent to which your condition has deteriorated.  The GP takes you at your word and the hospital should be expected to do likewise.  Therefore, the hospital can only compare you and your condition to other patients on the waiting list, to decide who needs to be prioritised.

You will find below a template letter for you to use if you want to inform the hospital of a change in your circumstances. Please download the template and complete with your details, explaining how your symptoms have changed since the referral. Edit the ‘greyed out’ texts in the Word document with the necessary details and post the letter to Outpatient Appointments (if waiting for first appointments) or to your Consultant’s Secretary (for follow up care).

Expedite Letter for Editing

**For security reasons, all documents on our website are PDFs, however if you save the document to your computer, then right click on the saved file, you can then choose to open with Word.  You will be able to edit the document as you please.  **