Evidence Submission: Self-Referral to Physiotherapy

This report, from the University of Bristol, discusses the evidence to support Self-Referral to Physiotherapy, a policy first introduced by the previous Labour government in its White Paper, ‘Our Health, Our Care, Our Say’.

Self-referral aimed to enable patients to refer themselves directly to a physiotherapist without having to see a GP first. In doing so, the initiative intended to get patients back to work faster, to reduce waiting times, increase patient choice, reduce costs and reduce the workload for GPs.

The Department of Health published an evaluation of six pilots of this initiative. However, the University of Bristol’s report reviewed DH’s evaluation and drew different conclusions. The evaluation was limited in design and scope, and did not address all of its aims.

This report concluded that there was no robust evidence from the Department of Health evaluation about the impact of self-referral on the important outcomes of patient clinical outcome, return to work, waiting times, GP workload or NHS costs. The initiative, by its nature, improved patient choice, and whilst there was some evidence that self-referral did not increase demand on physiotherapy services, by expanding the programme, demand may increase in areas with high levels of unmet need.

Click here to read the full report and you can read the summary report of all the reviews here.