Patient Record

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Sharing Your Medical Record

Increasingly, patient medical data is shared e.g. between GP surgeries and District Nursing, in order to give clinicians access to the most up to date information when attending patients.

The systems we operate require that any sharing of medical information is consented to by patients beforehand. Patients must consent to sharing of the data held by a health provider out to other health providers and must also consent to which of the other providers can access their data.

e.g. it may be necessary to share data held in GP practices with district nurses but the local podiatry department would not need to see it to undertake their work. In this case, patients would allow the surgery to share their data, they would allow the district nurses to access it but they would not allow access by the podiatry department. In this way access to patient data is under patients' control and can be shared on a 'need to know' basis.

Summary Care Record

There is a new Central NHS Computer System called the Summary Care Record (SCR). The Summary Care Record is meant to help emergency doctors and nurses help you when you contact them when the surgery is closed. Initially, it will contain just your medications and allergies.

Later on as the central NHS computer system develops, (known as the ‘Summary Care Record’ – SCR), other staff who work in the NHS will be able to access it along with information from hospitals, out of hours services, and specialists letters that may be added as well.

Your information will be extracted from practices such as ours and held on central NHS databases.   

As with all new systems there are pros and cons to think about. When you speak to an emergency doctor you might overlook something that is important and if they have access to your medical record it might avoid mistakes or problems, although even then, you should be asked to give your consent each time a member of NHS Staff wishes to access your record, unless you are medically unable to do so.

On the other hand, you may have strong views about sharing your personal information and wish to keep your information at the level of this practice. Connecting for Health (CfH), the government agency responsible for the Summary Care Record have agreed with doctors’ leaders that new patients registering with this practice should be able to decide whether or not their information is uploaded to the Central NHS Computer System.

For existing patients it is different in that it is assumed that you want your record uploaded to the Central NHS Computer System unless you actively opt out.

Children and Young People

There is a general assumption amongst our patients that parents (or individual given parental responsibility) have access to their child’s medical record or details about their clinical care until they are the age of 16 or 18. This is in fact not the case.

Children over the age of 12 are generally considered to have the capacity to give or withhold consent to release medical records. More specifically, those under 16 should demonstrate that they have the capacity to make these decisions. Where the child is considered to be capable, then their consent must be sought before access is given to a third party, in this case the parent.

Access can be refused by the health professional where they consider that the child does not have capacity to give consent / decline decisions. If the appropriate health professional considers that a child patient is Gillick competent (i.e. has sufficient maturity and understanding to make decisions about disclosure of their records) then the child should be asked for his or her consent before disclosure is given to someone with parental responsibility.

If the child is not Gillick competent and there is more than one person with parental responsibility, each may independently exercise their right of access.

In all circumstances good practice dictates that a Gillick competent child should be encouraged to involve parents or other legal guardians in any treatment/disclosure decisions.

Therefore, our current Practice Policy is to remove parental access to all those who turn 14 unless we have written consent from the individual to state otherwise.

Do you want to manage your child's repeat prescriptions online?

You can also get online access to book their appointments and view their medical record.

Once this is set up, you can then access these services through the NHS App.

Find out how to Apply to access a child's online GP services (NHS website)

This service is designed and run by the NHS, so your personal information is safe.