Oral Surgery: Internal Triage

The first stage of processing referrals is to review them and ensure that they are appropriate for your service.

We will email you (using the address provided at sign in), every Monday morning with the current status of your referrals:

Here are the referrals in your PReSS dashboard:

Referrals waiting to be assessed: 1
Accepted referrals: 3
Contacted referrals:3
Rejected referrals: 0
Discharged referrals: 6

You will see that there is one referral waiting to be assessed. Click on “Triage These Referrals” to assess the patients that have been allocated to you. In most areas these referrals will already have been assessed by the triage team as appropriate for your service.

*Please Note: By accepting these patients you are not committing to carrying out their treatment. There are various discharge options available once you have accepted the referral that will allow you to return the referral to the GPD, the referral centre or send on to Secondary/Advanced care as required

!The triage undertaken by your areas clinical triagers is done to send the referral to the correct level of care, for the work required, based on your commissioning teams guidelines. They do not provide treatment planning or allocation of time-slots for appointments, this is done by you when accepting and consequently booking referrals in. This is a provider referral status system – not choose and book.

Please note: You can select “Show Advanced Options” from the triage screen which will allow you to skip through referrals to search for a specific URN so that you can reach a priority patient easily. The advanced option is located at the top right of the triage screen.

You may see the attached information at the top of the page, this is so any comments from the triager or the referral centre can be relayed to you regarding the referral

You have a series of options while initiatively assessing referrals:

This option should be used to accept the patient for an appointment. It enables you to follow your usual process for booking and appointing patients. Once clicked the patient’s referral will be moved to “Accepted”.

This option enables you to return a referral to the Management Centre. You may wish to do this for a number of reasons; for example, there has been an error in triage, the patient is not the correct age for your service etc. Please provide a short note in the comments section to inform us of the reason for the return.
(Please do not use this to re-direct to Secondary care or reject to the GDP as there are other options for this)

This function should be used if you believe that the referral would be more appropriately seen in Secondary care. You must provide a justification for this re-direction in the comments box. All referrals will have been triaged and hence deemed appropriate for your service and onwards referrals of this type are monitored. PLEASE NOTE: Your comments are sent verbatim to the provider and are rendered into a PDF file that becomes part of the referral.

This function should be used if you believe that the referral should be seen under the fast track cancer referral pathway. You must provide a justification for this re-direction in the comments box. All referrals will have been triaged and this option should only be used if there is a clear need for a two week wait referral under the NICE guidelines

This option enables you to reject the referral back to the referring GDP with a formatted template letter. You must provide the reason for rejection. Everything that is typed in the comments box is passed, verbatim, to the referring dentist and is not viewed or edited by the referral team.

If there are images associated with the referral you can view these within the triage page, or use our PACS viewer for better resolution imaging and image manipulation tools. Press the “View in PACS” button to launch the PACS viewer.

You will have access to the PACS images of all patients in your referral worklist at any time during treatment and prior to discharge. If you take radiographs as part of your assessment and treatment, please upload these at discharge or onward referral to secondary care, so that they can be made available to the referring dentist or to the new provider.