TABLE OF CONTENTS


Introduction

Advice and Guidance is a key part of this year's (2025/26) GP Contract changes. This includes a £20 Item of Service fee (IoS) per each 'pre-referral' A&G request. GP practices that have signed up for the enhanced service are required to manually submit claims for payment via CQRS each month. 


It is important to note that only one claim can be made per an episode of care. There is no nationally defined code to use and so many ICBs (and Ardens) recommend using the SNOMED code "Choose and book advice and guidance request -820641000000100".


As there is only a single code to use there is a risk that a patient may have this code recorded more than once for each episode of care. For example a GP may record during a telephone conversation with a Consultant, and then the medical secretary might also use it to record a referral letter being sent for the same patient. There will therefore need to be a manual checking process completed before submitting a claim via CQRS.


Ardens has provided resources to assist practices with claim figures.


Template

Advice and Guidance requests can be made by telephone, email or referral. If a referral has not been generated, you may wish to consider using the Ardens templates to code and record details of the request. 


All users can access the template in two ways.

  • Pressing F12 and adding the "Advice & Guidance" template to your favourites.
  • Searching for the "Advice & Guidance" template in the bottom left of SystmOne



If you are an Ardens Pro user, you can also access the template by:

  • Clicking on the orange arrow to open the communications template and selecting the "Advice & Guidance DES" link on the home page.


This will be made live to all Pro users over the next couple of weeks. If you have any particular requests about this, please contact your ICB Referral Lead or email us at documents@ardens.org.uk.



Once you have located the advice and guidance using one of the templates above, you must ensure you have selected the "Advice & guidance request" tick box, to add the appropriate payment code once the template has been saved.


Clinicians are also advised to document the patient understands the request and that the request has been led by a GP. Both these options are available to select.


Select the relevant advice method (email, telephone or referral) and record whether this is a first or ongoing episode. Please do remember that payment for A+G relates to the first episode only.


Use the Notes and Outcome field to provide further information about the request.


Once complete, click OK. This will save the information back to the patient record.


Report

To access the report on your clinical system, navigate to Clinical Reporting > Arden's Ltd > Contracts I 2025 26 I ES and VI folder:


This folder contains a report for the current month, plus previous month, select the relevant folder.



Included in each of these folders is a report which shows the total number of advice and guidance requests recorded using the appropriate code.



Right click on the report and select Run, using the further breakdown options if required.


Dashboard (for Ardens Manager Subscribers)

For Ardens Manager subscribers, the Advice and Guidance dashboard will allow you to see activity at GP practice, PCN and ICB level.


Login to Ardens Manager


Select the Contracts option, followed by Advice & Guidance ES '25-26'.



This will open the dashboard by default on the Overview tab. 



The Clinical Activity section of the dashboard will display the available reports - broken down by this month, last month and this fiscal year.



The definition of the reports are as follows:

  • Patient Count - this counts the number of patients with the required code, regardless of the number of times the advice and guidance code has been entered. 
  • Activity Count - this counts the number of times the advice and guidance code has been used, regardless if the code has been added multiple times for the patient. 
  • Event Count - this counts the number of events (consultations) that includes the advice and guidance code.


The right side of the reports displays the Achieved column. This column shows the total numbers for each report, assisting you with your manual claim submissions.



To see details of the patients for each of these reports, click on the View button against the required report and select the Patient tab.



 

Note - patient level data can only be accessed at GP practice level. Users must be enabled to see patient level data, access this support article for details on how to do this. 


The standard Ardens Manager features can be used on the dashboard for monitoring trends, benchmarking activities, and breaking down data by demographics and staff activity. For more information on using these features, please access our support articles. 


If you require any further assistance on the process above, please contact the Ardens SystmOne Support Team on: support-systmone@ardens.org.uk