The technology that allows healthcare professionals to view summary care records will change on Monday (3 June), GP practices have been warned.
The Summary Care Record application (SCRa) will be fully switched off and replaced by the National Care Record Service (NCRS), which provides access to more than 63 million records.
Users will automatically be redirected to NCRS, according to NHS England.
In a bulletin sent out earlier this month, NHS England said it ‘anticipates minimal impact for users’ and that ‘all existing smartcard credentials and access rights will continue to function on the new system’.
The new service is a web-based application and can be accessed regardless of what IT system an organisation is using.
All information that was available in SCRa will remain available in the new NCRS service, although it will have a new look and feel.
Services that can be accessed by health care professionals, in addition to summary care records that are created from GP medical records, include being able to search for patient NHS numbers, Covid vaccination information (patients’ vaccination history), child protection information and more.
Doctors, nurses, pharmacists and paramedics are among those that can access patient summary care reocords.
Further information and guidance about the switch over is available here.
Meanwhile, the GP Connect functionality which enables pharmacists to add to GP records with ‘one click’ is still being ‘phased’ in, with practices having to manually add Pharmacy First consultation information to patient records in the meantime.
A version of this story was first published by Pulse’s sister title Management in Practice
Pharmacies are paid to add Pharmacy First consultation information to GP records, and doing so is an obligation put on the Pharmacists involved by the General Medical Council, since those Pharmacists are, at the time, “practising Medicine”, so are subjet to GMC requirements.
So why do GPs have to do this work for Pharmacists for free ??