England GPs and Hospitals Required to Share Data for Single Patient Records

GPs and hospitals in England will be required to share patient data under legislation to be announced in the King’s Speech on Wednesday. The legislation will create a single patient record for each person that can be used across all healthcare providers.

It forms part of a £10bn digitisation of the health service. Officials said making the data accessible in one place would save lives. They added that the change would spare patients from repeatedly having to provide their medical history when attending hospital or being discharged back to their GP.

Paramedics attending heart attack and stroke patients currently cannot see full medical records in many cases. Hospitals often lack access to a patient’s complete history beyond current medicines and known allergies. GPs must wait for emailed letters from consultants to learn what happened during a hospital visit.

The single patient records will be available to clinicians in parts of the NHS as early as next year, including for maternity and frailty care. The Department of Health and Social Care confirmed the timeline. The legislation will also form part of a health bill that will scrap NHS England by 2027.

Officials stated that patients would receive safer, quicker and more accurate healthcare as the records join up fragmented information from around the country. Patients would gain more control and transparency with clear safeguards, audit trails and choice over how their data is used.

For clinicians, the system would remove the need to work with missing information or search in multiple places. The upcoming legislation would enable information related to a patient’s health and care to be processed for the purposes of establishing and operating the single patient records.