After your appointment

In this section:

Before leaving your appointment

Many people find it helpful to bring a friend, family member or carer to the appointment.  Please ask your healthcare professional any questions you need to. You can bring a note pad, and pen if you would like to write anything down and help you understand: 

  • What your diagnosis is or what might be causing your health problems 
  • Whether any more scans or tests could be helpful  
  • What treatment options might be suitable for you 
  • What you can expect to happen next 

You and your healthcare professional make decisions together about your care.  

What happens next 

At your appointment, you (this includes your carer, if you have one) and your healthcare professional will agree what happens next. We will write this in your appointment outcome letter, which we will send to you and your GP. Here is more about those options: 

If you need another appointment 

If your next appointment is in six weeks or sooner, we might ask you to book your next appointment before you leave the clinic area

  • If it is in more than six weeks, we will send you a text with a link, ring you or send you a letter nearer the time and invite you to choose your next appointment date – we call this Choice Booking. 
  • If you prefer not to choose, we will always contact you with an appointment date and time. 

If you don’t need another appointment 

  • we will transfer your care back to your referrer or GP 
  • we will send you a letter which confirms this 
  • If you need another appointment after that you will need to be referred again  

When and how to get in touch 

  • If you’ve waited longer than expected for another appointment, test or scan, please contact our patient service centre to help you with this. Call them on 020 3313 5000 or email i.outpatientappointments@nhs.net 
  • If we sent you a link to book your appointment, you may have the option to cancel and reschedule your appointment 
  • If something changes such, as a flare in your symptoms, you can easily contact us if you need to, sooner than planned. We might call this patient initiated follow up – (PIFU) and it will be explained in your appointment outcome letter. Find out more about Patient Initiated Follow-Up (PIFU)
  • You can also find information about many of our services in the clinical service directory. 

Tests and scans 

If you need a test or scan before your next appointment, for example a blood test or an x-ray, we will send you the details of where and when to have the test or scan. 

Procedures and surgery 

If you need a procedure or surgery at your next appointment, we will send you the details about this.   

You can also read more about consenting to treatment here. 

Prescriptions

If we give you an outpatient prescription at your hospital appointment, you will need to collect the medicines from the outpatients’ pharmacy at the hospital. Locate a pharmacy here.

Many outpatient prescriptions are now sent electronically on our hospital system, so we might not give you a paper prescription to take to the pharmacy. The pharmacy team will be able to find your prescription and dispense your medicine. 

Our hospital clinics will usually give you two to four weeks’ supply of medicines. Sometimes your treatment will be longer than this, or a smaller supply is more appropriate.  You can check with the outpatient pharmacy team about this. They will be able to tell you whether you need to go to your GP for a repeat prescription or come back to the hospital for it.  

Your healthcare record 

You can access information that we hold about your care on our secure personal health record system the Care Information Exchange (CIE). More information is here. 

 Your feedback

Your feedback helps us to continuously improve our services. If you recently had an outpatient appointment, please tell us how we did, using this link: Feedback - complaints, comments and concerns 

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