New contractual requirements came into force from 1 April 2014 requiring that GP practices should make available a statement of intent in relation to the following IT developments:

1. Summary Care Record (SCR)
2. GP to GP Record Transfers
3. Patient Online Access to Their GP Record
4. Data for commissioning and other secondary care purposes

The same contractual obligations require that we have a statement of intent regarding these developments in place and publicised by 30 September 2014.

Please find below details of our stance with regards to these developments.

 

GP to GP Record Transfers

NHS England requires practices to utilise the GP2GP facility for the transfer of patient records between practices, when a patient registers or de-registers (not for temporary registration).

It is very important that you are registered with a doctor at all times. If you leave your GP and register with a new GP, your medical records will be removed from your previous doctor and forwarded on to your new GP via NHS England. It can take your paper records several weeks to reach your new surgery.

With GP to GP record transfers your electronic record is transferred to your new practice much sooner.

King Cross Surgery confirms that GP to GP transfers are already active and we send and receive patient records via this system.

 

Patient Online Access to Their GP Record

NHS England require practices to promote and offer the facility to enable patients online access to appointments, prescriptions, allergies and adverse reactions or have published plans in place to achieve this by 31^st of March 2015.

We currently offer the facility for booking and cancelling appointments and also for ordering your repeat prescriptions on-line. This is done by the SystmOne Online facility. If you do not already have a user name and password for this system – please register for them by speaking to a Service Advisor at Reception.

King Cross Surgery confirms that access to the Summary Care Record is available for patients to view using SystmOne Online.

NHS England also requires practices, by 31st March 2016, to promote and offer the facility for patients to access online all information from their medical record which is held in coded form unless, in the opinion of the practice, access would cause serious harm to the patient’s or any other person’s,  physical or mental health; or that the information includes a reference to a non-consenting third party; or that the record contains a free text entry that cannot be separated from the coded entry.

We are currently awaiting clear national guidance relating to this and will open this facility up to patients once received.

 

Data for commissioning and other secondary care purposes

It is already a requirement of the Health and Social Care Act that practices must meet the reasonable data requirements of commissioners and other health and social care organisations through appropriate and safe data sharing for secondary use.

King Cross Surgery confirms these arrangements are in place and that we undertake annual training and audits to ensure that all our data is handled correctly and safely via the Information Governance Toolkit.

 

30 September 2014 – Updated 23 March 2016

When you contact King Cross Surgery we aim to assist you with your enquiry as quickly and efficiently as we can.

• If you contact us via phone, by online consultation (Patchs) or by walking-in we will offer you assistance with your query in the same way.
• If you need support with an admin query, such as a sick (fit)note, referral information or a request for private work, our Service Advisors will direct this to the most appropriate team member to assist. Routine administrative queries will be responded to in 48 hours, and our team will advise of the timescale to complete your request.
• If you require support with a clinical query, depending on the nature of your query we may provide guidance on self-management, signpost you to self-refer to a community service, we may refer you to our community pharmacy team, or offer an urgent or routine appointment with the most appropriate clinician. This will be face to face or telephone, depending on your preference and the nature of your concern.
• The on the day urgent appointments open at 8am and 1.30pm. We do this to ensure that we have availability across the entire day to help manage daily demand.
• We aim to ensure that patients are not advised to contact us again where possible but will at times face high demand for urgent appointments. If you have a clinical concern that will not wait for the next routine appointment and we are full to a safe working capacity, you will be advised that a note of your call will be added to your medical record and asked to call at the next appointment opening period. For those who are deemed as vulnerable, such as those aged under two, over 75 and those with learning disabilities, a message will be sent to the Duty Doctor with details of the symptoms. The Duty Doctor will then advise further.

Routine appointments will be dealt with according to availability and will be affected by holidays/illness. We do our best to meet reasonable requests and we discuss abuse of our appointment system with patients. Our doctors alone held over 22 000 surgery appointments last year and carried out over 2000 home visits.

We have routine appointments available for booking and always keep a number of appointments each day for urgent problems that arise. The demand for appointments however is still high and we do our best to meet patients’ needs.