Progress To Date
The roll-out of CaB in 2005 and 2006 suffered a number of delays; some technical because of its dependency on other NPfIT work streams, partly through functional problems in early releases, and partly through clinicians' concerns about additional workload.
There are conflicting views about its effectiveness, both from a technical viewpoint (it is hard to distinguish between bugs in CaB and the systems with which it interfaces) and a service perspective (some users argue that it undermines existing good practice, while others praise the convenience and reduced delays it offers to patients). A 2006 survey (published 2008) found that the majority of patients were not experiencing the degree of choice that the system was designed to deliver.
To increase the uptake of Choose & Book by doctors in England, surgeries were offered a financial incentive for the first part of 2006, but it continues to suffer from adverse publicity in the medical press and resistance from a number of GPs.
As the application became more stable during 2005 and 2006, booking volumes have increased, albeit more slowly than planned. At December 2006, over 1.5M patients had used Choose and Book. By the end of October 2008, this had risen to over 10M bookings, with daily figures of over 20,000. All Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) in England are live with Choose and Book (although that may only be one GP within a PCT or practice), while all NHS Acute Trusts and a large number of Independent Sector Hospitals are using Choose and Book. At 28 October 2008, 93% of practices were providing the service, and while some PCTs are only seeing low volumes (30% and less in some cases), many are booking 70 to 80% of patients using Choose and Book.
Use reached a high point nationally of 57% of referrals in the first two months of 2010. As incentive schemes were scaled back there has been a drop in use to 50% at the start of 2012.
Read more about this topic: Choose And Book
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