The Referral to Treatment (RTT) standard is a key indicator on how trusts are delivering on a patient's right to receive treatment within 18 weeks of being referred to a consultant-led service.
Please see this important message from Chief Clinical Information Officer Graham Walsh, which highlights the importance of using the correct codes.
The RTT Pathway made Simple
The NHS Constitution established that patients “have the right to access certain services commissioned by NHS bodies within maximum waiting times”. The RTT standard is a key performance standard indicating how trusts are delivering on a patient's right to receive treatment within 18 weeks of being referred to a consultant-led service.
A significant proportion of our patients are monitored against this standard leading to a large amount of data being generated to assist teams in managing their services to deliver this standard. Its an important indicator to the trust, other organisations and patients and we need to make sure our data is accurate.
With the introduction of EPR, clinicians are being asked to be more involved in RTT reporting and as an organisation we realise this isn’t always s as easy as we would want. We are therefore putting together some education pieces to try and improve our understanding of the pathway and hopefully this will improve our compliance and improve our RTT performance.
Over the coming weeks you will receive emails that set out to improve our education on RTT. Please don’t delete these but take the time to read through them and help us improve our performance which hopefully promotes our approach to clinically effective, safe and efficient care in a timely manner.
Key RTT messages:
- For fracture patients use 98 Not Applicable to RTT.
- On discharge after treatment use 30 First Treatment.
- At follow up after treatment use 90 Treatment given previously.
- Only use 10 New treatment plan when a decision is made for substantively new or different treatment that was not already planned.