To calculate your referral rate expressed as a proportion per 1000 of the population you will need to have accurate figures about:

• The number of referrals made to your service during the last year.
• The size of the population you serve (verify this with your business manager).

Use this calculator to do the sums for you, it will provide you with the referral rate per 1000, which is the way you should be reporting activity to your service.

Calculator

Physiotherapy services can then go on to use the 'Self referral Anticipated Referral Calculator' to get an indication of whether or not introducing self referral will result in an increased demand to your service.

To do this, follow these steps:

• Calculate your present referral rate as an expression of the annual rate per 1000 of the population you serve.
  
• Classify the population in terms of its location, i.e. use national definitions; urban, semi-rural, rural.
  
• Compare your present rate of referral with the mean according to the classification of location.

Average rates

• urban settings : 44.5 per 1000
  
• semi-rural settings : 49 per 1000
  
• rural settings : 66 per 1000

If your referral rate per 1000 is much lower, you can anticipate that you will experience an increase in the total number of referrals if you introduce self referral. However, if your present referral rate per 1000 is similar or exceeds that quoted, you can anticipate that there will no increase in the number of referrals.