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:
- Summary Care Record (SCR)
- GP to GP Record Transfers
- Patient Online Access to Their GP Record
- 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 31st 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