Key Summary
- New legislation will legally require GPs and hospitals to share data, ending the current system where information is trapped in separate "silos."
- Clinicians will move beyond seeing just allergies/medications to accessing a patient’s full history, including consultant notes and test results.
- The system will launch as early as 2027 for Maternity and Frailty/Elderly care, where missing data poses the highest clinical risk.
The UK government is set to introduce legislation this Wednesday (13) to create a Single Patient Record, mandating that GPs and hospitals share data to improve care coordination.
Health secretary Wes Streeting said patients were tired of repeating their medical histories at each appointment. The MP spoke at a ministerial statement for the 10-Year Health Plan for England.
The new development, pushed by Labour, will be announced in the King’s Speech. The plan is part of a £10 billion digitisation of the health service.
Currently, only emergency information is available in this manner, including current medicines and known allergies. GPs often have to wait for letters, sent by email, from consultants to have any idea what happened to their patient in the hospital.
The health secretary said making the data shared and accessible in one place would be a “gamechanger” and mean faster care that saves more lives.
It will be available to clinicians in parts of the NHS as early as next year, with priority given to maternity and elderly care, the Department of Health and Social Care said.
Streeting said: “As patients, there’s nothing more frustrating than having to repeat your medical history at every appointment. When paramedics arrive to heart attack and stroke patients, they can’t see the patients’ medical records, putting them in even greater danger.
“For the first time ever, the single patient record will mean patients are given real control over their care through a single, secure and authoritative account of their data.”
Patient safety minister, Dr Zubir Ahmed, a transplant surgeon in Glasgow, said the present way of working was unacceptable. He described how in January he was not able to do a kidney transplant because he could not access the patient’s full history quickly enough.
He explained: “There were some symptoms that had been reported by the family that I needed to analyse further to exclude cancer. I could not interrogate it in more detail because it was a weekend and there was no access to the GP records.”
