It has come to our attention that the Psychiatry Access Team are writing to GPs, who have referred patients to them, advising they will not proceed with a referral and asking for a list of additional information.

This letter and approach have not been discussed with your LMC representatives.

We raised this with the Psychiatry Associate Medical Director for Pennine Acute and their Director of Operations, for Stockport South, who agree this is neither safe nor appropriate and they have undertaken to speak to the Access Team to have them halt this activity with immediate effect.

However, it may be possible that you have already received such a letter. If this is the case we have produced a template letter for you to use/amend should you choose to respond to the Access Team to proceed with the referral.

If you have any additional information available to supplement the referral, then please do add this to the response, but we do not anticipate that GPs should be recalling patients to gather this further information causing delays in the patient journey and possible disengagement of the patient.

We will be developing an interface with the new psychiatric leadership team in Stockport over the coming months and we welcome feedback of both problems and positive experiences with how psychiatry interface with you, to help us inform these discussions.

Please send feedback to lgmch.lmcteam@nhs.net and use the subject “Psychiatry service feedback”.

Lastly, following on from a previous email, we can confirm the service has recruited a medium-term locum Psychiatrist for Stockport South Sector who started with the team last week (w/c 30 Jan 23).