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. Therefore, it is important to select the correct episode within the A&G template.
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 & 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 that the patient understands the request and that the request has been led by a GP. Both these options are available to select. Once selected the pencil icon becomes enabled for the clinician to free text any notes.
Select the relevant advice method (email, telephone or referral) then you must ensure that you select the appropriate episode of care (first episode or ongoing episode) – this allows you to then use the reports outlined below to submit the manual claims, easily identifying the first episode of care rather than an ongoing episode which can’t be claimed for.
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.
Reports
To access the reports on your clinical system, navigate to Clinical Reporting > Arden's Ltd > Contracts I 2025 26 I ES and VI folder:
This folder contains reports for the current month and the previous month, select the relevant folder.
Included in each of these folders is four different reports, relating to advice & guidance requests: All; First episode; No episode recorded; Ongoing episode – these reports have been created to help decipher which advice & guidance request is the first episode, as you can only submit one claim per episode of care.
First episode – these are the advice & guidance requests that have been coded as the first episode of care and what you would submit for your claims.
No episode of care – this report captures the number of advice & guidance requests where there has been no episode of care coded on the patient record.
To select an episode of care, go into the patients record and using F12 select the “Advice & Guidance” template and update the episode, the next day (SystmOne reports update overnight) that patient will fall into the relevant report based on which episode has been specified (either first episode or ongoing episode).
Ongoing episode – these are the advice & guidance requests that have been sent for a patient since the first episode of care and have then been coded as 'ongoing episode' on the template. These wouldn’t be submitted for claims as you can only claim for the first episode of care.
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.
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