Patients in North Central London to benefit from joined up health records

What does this mean for you?

The joined-up record will mean that the health and care professionals involved in your care can see your information and make quicker and safer decisions about your care.

As a user of local health and care services there are lots of advantages to having a joined-up record:

• Everyone involved in your care will have the whole picture
• When you visit somewhere different for care or meet a new care professional, they will have access to important health and care information
• The results of common tests (for example blood tests) will be available to everyone involved in your care, regardless of where the test took place, reducing the need to repeat them
• Professionals responsible for your care will be able to look at your health and care record to plan and improve your care
• Professionals from different organisations will be able to look at anonymised health and care records and ensure that you, and others like you, are getting the best care from the whole team

For health and social care professionals this means that:

• A complete, up-to-date record of an individual’s health and social care information helps them to make more informed decisions
• They will have to spend less time finding out relevant information from different health and social care organisations and IT systems, and won’t have to spend time recording duplicate information across records
• They will be able to use information to plan and improve care for their residents
• Health and care professionals can work as a team to identify opportunities for improvement. They can do this using anonyomised information, with residents’ personal details removed

You can find out more about what having a joined health care record means for you, in the video below. You can also find out more via downloading an information leaflet.

What information is available in the joined up record?

Most of your current health and care information, such as medication and allergies, the summary of your care from past hospital stays and future appointments will be included. This will be your recent history as health and care services have not always recorded this information on electronic systems.

Over time, it will also include information from other organisations that provide NHS and local authority social care services. This includes mental health records and those created by social workers. However, not every element of your information is part of the joint record.  The health records of all adults and children will be joined up as well as adult social care information.  We do not currently plan to include children’s social care records.

The information in the joined-up record will be used in different ways:

• It will be used by health and care workers when you visit them, or they visit you
• It will also be used by care teams to understand people’s health and care needs
• It will be used to ensure that we provide a high-quality of care to residents across our boroughs who suffer from long-term health conditions

You have a choice

If you are happy for your information to be part of this joined up health and care record, then you don’t need to do anything.  However, if you don’t want to be included, you need to take action.

If you opt out, your information will not be shared via the electronic joined-up record however it will continue to be shared by care organisations as it is now, by phone, email and on paper.

Before opting out, please ensure that you have read this leaflet carefully and do so understanding what it means for you.  If you choose to opt out, you will not be able to take advantage of the benefits that the electronic joined-up record can bring you. The care professionals looking after you won’t have your full history and most recent information available to them when they assess you, and decisions about your care may take longer, even in emergency situations.