Primary care health professionals, including community pharmacists, have been creating electronic records of their interactions with patients for many years, but these records have not usually been integrated. In the past there have been attempts to create central patient record systems for use by all healthcare professionals, but the focus is now on ensuring inter-operability between individual health record systems and across boundaries.

NHS policy

The Department of Health Information Strategy – The Power of Information – set out a vision for how information could facilitate joining up care within the NHS. A key commitment set out in the strategy was providing all NHS patients with secure online access, where they wish it, to their personal GP records by 2015. As part of a Directed Enhanced Service under the GP contract, GP practices were financially incentivised to deliver patient access to records. More than 97% of the population now has the access to summary medical records online.

The NHS Summary Care Record (SCR) is an electronic summary of key clinical information. Further information on the SCR can be found in the SCR section of the website.

PSNC view

PSNC is supportive of the commitment and work related to setting common standards to enable information to flow effectively around the health system by granting community pharmacy with increasing the ability to record information into EHRs.

Further information

If you have queries on this webpage or you require more information please contact it@psnc.org.uk.

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