Version: 1.0.2 | Published: 1 Dec 2025 | Updated: 2 days ago

NHS Booking and Referral Standard

Dataset

Summary

Type:
  • Information standards
  • Technical standards and specifications
Effective From:
15 April 2023
Applies To:
  • NHS 111/clinical assessment services (CAS)
  • Accident and Emergency departments (A&E)
  • Urgent Treatment Centres (UTC)
Impacts On:
Implementation of this information standard impacts all health IT systems suppliers providing systems to the above providers; suppliers should work with their customers to determine necessary changes.
Topics:
  • Appointment / scheduling
  • Data definitions and terminologies
  • Health Level 7 (HL7)
  • Interoperability
  • Referrals
Care Settings:
  • Hospital
  • Urgent and Emergency Care
Alternate Name:
Also known as BaRS.

Documentation

Description:

The creation of NHS Booking and Referral Standard (BaRS) delivers the strategic interoperability to facilitate a booking, and for any associated referral information to be shared between a sending organisation such as an NHS 111 Provider, and a receiving organisation such as an Emergency Department.

BaRS is therefore an interoperability standard between patient record systems that enables booking and referral information to be sent between NHS healthcare system providers quickly, safely and in a format that is useful to clinicians.

Based on use cases and implementation of BaRS at different organisation types it is anticipated that there will be the need to amend the standard further down the line to include and support other new use cases.

Fixing a specific conformance date for the totality of BaRS is not feasible as the scope of the standard will expand over time as new use cases for its application are requested and subsequently created by the BaRS development team. Therefore, conformance will be monitored in line with the review dates and/or any formal change to the Information Standard.

Post-implementation review dates of 31 March 2024 (initial review) and 31 March 2025 (intermediate review) have been set.

Relations:
[object Object]
Dependencies:
[object Object]