PFS Appointments

This guidance is under active development by NHS Digital and content may be added or updated on a regular basis.
Note: This is a draft version of the GP Connect PFS Appointments capability. The current version can be found using this link.

Appointments Consumer Sessions

The Appointment Management consumer application makes use of individual API calls described in 'API use cases' to perform business processes.

Consumer session - booking an appointment

The sequence diagram below illustrates which individual API calls are required by a consumer (ie the patient using a consumer application) to book an appointment at a GP practice in the simplest case. It describes interactions of the consumer system with the provider FHIR endpoint at the practice, and does not include details of the prerequisite interactions with Spine services. ***NB Need APIM version of this *** See Spine integration illustrated for details of an end-to-end appointment booking scenario with Spine service interactions included.

Sequence diagram for booking an appointment - simplest case

Step Description
1a Consumer makes an API call to Search for free slots at the practice in the specified timeframe.
1b Provider responds with details of what slots are available for booking. Should no applicable slots be returned, the consumer may make repeated calls to Search for free slots with amended date ranges.
2a Consumer calls Book an appointment indicating the slots selected in the UI together with the logical ID of the patient.
2b Provider responds with details of the booked appointment as confirmation of success.

Consumer session - booking an appointment at a collection of federating practices

Where a consumer user interface provides a view of available bookings across a collection of federating practices, some steps are repeated for each practice, as shown below:

Sequence diagram for booking an appointment - no patient found

Step Description
Repeat step 1 for each federated practice to gain a view of slot availability across the federation
1a Consumer makes an API call to Search for free slots at the practice in the specified timeframe.
1b Provider responds with details of what slots are available for booking. Should no applicable slots be returned, the consumer may make repeated calls to Search for free slots with amended date ranges.
2a Consumer calls Book an appointment indicating the slots selected in the UI together with the logical ID of the patient.
2b Provider responds with details of the booked appointment as confirmation of success.
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