NHS Enhanced Summary Care Record
Your Information and How it is Used by your Local NHS Organisation
Have you consented to an Enhanced Summary Care Record?
Your Summary Care Record allows professionals providing your care access to key information about your health, medical history and preferences when they are treating you.
Local healthcare leads advise that all patients consent to an ‘Enhanced’ Summary Care Record to include additional information.
Quicker access to key information can mean quicker and more accurate diagnosis and treatment for you.
For further information please ask a member of our practice staff.
To download and print a consent form please click on the below link, and return to the surgery
What is a Summary Care Record (SCR)?
Your Summary Care Record is an electronic summary of key information from your GP medical record. If you need healthcare away from your usual doctor’s surgery, your SCR will provide those looking after you with this information to help them give you better and quicker care.
This can be especially useful:
- in an emergency
- when you are on holiday
- when your surgery is closed
- at out-patient clinics
- when you visit a pharmacy
Summary Care Record - your 3 options:
You can choose how much information is shared through your Summary Care Record. You are much more likely to reap the benefits of SCR if you choose the enhanced version (option 2).
1. You can choose to have a ‘core’ Summary Care Record
All patients, unless they have opted out, have a ‘core’ Summary Care Record including basic information about their current medications, allergies, and bad reactions they have had to medicines.
2. You can choose to have an ‘enhanced’ Summary Care Record
This means your record will contain the ‘core’ information plus extra information that you think would be helpful for the healthcare staff who treat you. You must give your explicit consent for this.
That extra information could include:
- Information about your long term health conditions - such as asthma, diabetes, heart problems or rate medical conditions
- Your relevant medical history - clinical procedure that you have had, why you need a particular medicine, the care you are currently receiving and clinical advice to support your future care.
- Your healthcare needs and personal preferences - you may have particular communication needs, a long term condition that needs to be managed in a particular way, or you may have made legal decisions or have preferences about your care that you would like to be known.
- Immunisation information - details of previous vaccinations, such as tetanus and routing childhood jabs.
3. You can choose not to have a Summary Care Record
Information from your GP record concerning your current medications, allergies and bad reactions to medicines will not be readily available to other services treating you. Fewer than 5% of patients have chosen to opt out.
For more information, or to request an enhanced Summary Care Record, please talk to the staff at your GP practice. You can change your mind about what information you share at any time.
How will having a Summary Care Record help me?
Essential details about your healthcare can be very difficult to remember, particularly when you are unwell. Having an enhanced Summary Care Record means that healthcare professionals treating you will be better informed about you, which will increase the quality of your care.
You may have already seen the benefits of having a core Summary Care Record. One common benefit is when a patient is admitted to hospital and the Clinician treating them is able to see they are allergic to a particular medication and so prescribe an alternative.
How will my information be kept safe?
Your Summary Care Record can only be viewed by authorised staff who have an NHS smart card with a chip and PIN. They must ask for your consent to view your Summary Care Record, unless you are unconscious or otherwise unable to communicate and they believe that accessing your record is in your best interest. All access to you Summary Care record is documented and audited by the Privacy Officer of the organisation to ensure it is appropriate.
An enhanced Summary Care Record is not a copy of your whole record. Sensitive information such as fertility treatments, sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy termination or gender reassignment will not be included, unless you specifically ask for it to be.
To consent to an Enhanced Summary Care Record, you can collect a Consent Form from the Surgery Reception Desk. Please return your completed form to one of our Receptionists. Thank you.
The NHS are putting systems in place that may use your health related information for different purposes. The main systems are listed below. You have a choice about whether your information is used in these additional systems. If you want to opt out of any of these other additional information sharing processes, or to discuss them in more detail, please ask for more details at your GP surgery.
The NHS has put the electronic Summary Care Record (SCR) in place to enable health professionals to view basic but important details relating the medicines you take, allergies you have and any medicines that make you ill. Your SCR could be particularly important in an emergency situation when you may not be able to talk directly to those caring for you. You can opt out of the SCR but you should discuss the consequences of doing so with a health professional first.
The NHS seeks to make the best use of limited resources when delivering their services to the public. One means of doing this is to identify individuals or communities at greatest risk of developing certain conditions, such as diabetes. This system is known as risk stratification and will involve health professionals working in different organisations looking at your health related information in order to make decisions on the best course of treatment for you.
The NHS is committed to giving patients greater control over who they share their health related information with. One way of doing this is by enabling your GP, and other health professionals, to make decisions with you regarding your consent choices using the Enhanced Data Sharing Model (eDSM). This will be particularly relevant to you if you access a range of different healthcare services at the same time.
You should be aware that your GP health record forms part of a wider set of information relating to your care. You will always be allowed to exercise choices about whom you want your health related information to be shared with, and these choices will be respected.