General practitioners' referrals to specialist outpatient clinics. II. Locations of specialist outpatient clinics to which general practitioners refer patients.

Although linkage by computer of hospital administration systems across all clinics in a health district is becoming a practical possibility, complete records of general practitioners' referrals to outpatient clinics will be difficult to achieve. Data from a large study of general practitioners' referrals to such clinics were used to calculate the proportion of referrals that crossed district boundaries, the proportion that were made to the private sector; and the number of locations that each practice referred patients to. Of the 17,601 referrals from practices in Oxford Regional Health Authority, 13,857 (78.7%) were made to NHS outpatient clinics within practices' own districts, 1524 (8.7%) to clinics in other districts in the same region, 420 (2.4%) to NHS clinics in other regions, and 1800 (10.2%) to the private sector; but these proportions varied considerably among the practices. The mean number of different NHS hospitals or clinics that each practice referred patients to was 15.8 (range 4-42).