Preparing for Your Appointment

It is essential that you provide us with a referral addressed to us from your referring doctor (emailed to us ahead of time by your referring doctor to referrals@pmqneurology.com.au), and that this is valid at the time of our review. This allows us to triage your referral appropriately and provides us with essential information so that we can use our time productively (for consultations) and tailor neurodiagnostic investigations appropriately (for EEGs and NCSs/EMGs). General practitioner referrals are valid for 12 months (or indefinite referrals are valid indefinitely), whereas referrals from other specialists are valid for 3 months. Without a valid referral, we cannot bill Medicare for your appointment, which results in a much larger gap cost for the patient, so a valid referral is essential also for this reason.

Additionally, please have information about your current medications and doses readily available (preferably as a written list), and the details of any previous investigations available (especially MRI or CT scans of the nervous system, previous EEGs or NCS/EMG results, and previous blood tests), including where these were performed and any results/reports that you may have. This saves considerable time by avoiding the need to hunt down missing investigation results, and avoids the unnecessarily repeating of investigations that have already been performed, and therefore increases our efficiency and allows us to allocate more time to the patient’s current symptoms, the examination findings, and the diagnosis and management plan.