Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what progress they have made with rolling-out the capacity alerts system for the NHS e-referral service; and when they intend to make that a requirement for all referrals from general practice.

We are exploring the option of such alerts within the National Health Service e-Referral Service (e-RS) system to identify where there are capacity pressures within individual services. These have been utilised previously at the point of referral to allow referring clinicians to view capacity within providers. The re-introduction of this option requires further work to ensure there are no unintended consequences and regional oversight with local system commissioners to ensure provision for patient referrals is always available.