Specialist advice for primary care: an evaluation of a gastroenterology email advice service.

Communication between primary and secondary care -physicians is often unreliable and one sided in the form of clinic letters. Alternatively, general practitioners (GPs) may have difficulty contacting an on-call specialist via outdated hospital paging services. At Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, a gastroenterology email advice line was set up to promote dialogue and potentially help GPs deal with issues within their practices.