We would to have the ability to turn off new and ongoing health problem requests whilst still being able to let through requests for appointments such as routine monitoring blood tests, routing LTC reviews, cervical smears etc. At the moment we are managing this by having a message appear when the health problem forms are full asking patients to use the admin option. But this isn’t very intuitive for the patient and in addition that message still appears when the surgery is closed which makes it even more confusing for patients (maybe you can fix this out of hours message issue?). If we were able to have control over the “other” option for demand management, we could have finer control over this. Also we’d be able to direct patients to use the “other” option for things like smears as at the moment they use the ongoing health problem option which means we technically max out on our forms earlier than perhaps we should do.
