GP leaders to debate medical record keeping for transgender patients

GP leaders from across the UK will discuss transgender patient care at their national conference next month, including maintaining medical records.

LMCs will vote on demanding ‘clear’ national guidance on how to ensure transgender patients’ record are kept up to date.

The motion calls for guidance on how to maintain medical records and redacting and rescanning entire old records into new ones, and says there should also be support for patients ‘who wish to have their original details kept un-redacted’.

It calls for clinical systems to include in the patient registration biological sex, preferred gender pronoun, title for correspondence and gender reassignment.

And the use of additional data fields, beyond just those referencing gender or sex, would also help identify patients suitable for screening and automatically invite them to appropriate screening programmes.

Practices have previously raised concerns about the ‘Register with a GP surgery’ service because it fails to capture transgender patient information.

The motion said: ‘Conference expresses concern in offering our transgender patients the most appropriate options for care and treatment, while also maintaining their medical records and requires clear national guidance on whether to redact and rescan entire old NHS records into new records, with adequate resourcing to support any redaction and rescanning of medical records for these patients.’

At the conference in Glasgow on 8-9 May, GP leaders will also vote on demanding payment for any additional work transferred to general practice from secondary care.

It comes after the RCGP clarified GPs’ role in transgender care in a new position statement this month, saying that GPs should work with gender identity services ‘in the same way as any other specialist service’, including consideration of prescribing under a shared care arrangement.

And NHS England instructed GPs to refuse shared care with ‘unregulated providers’ for prescribing all hormone medication to children with gender incongruence.

In new guidance circulated to GPs this month, NHS England emphasised that services not regulated by the CQC or Health Inspectorate Wales ‘pose a risk to patient safety’ as they are ‘not subject to the same level of scrutiny’.