Summary Care Record
The Summary Care Record is an electronic record which will give healthcare staff, faster, easier access to essential information about you, to help provide you with safe treatment when you need care in an emergency or when your GP practice is closed.
It is intended that Summary Care Records will improve the safety and quality of patient care.
Healthcare staff will ask your permission every time they need to look at your Summary Care Record. If they cannot ask you, for example if you are unconscious, they may look at your record without asking you. If they have to do this, they will make a note on your record.
About your Summary Care Record
If you decide to have a Summary Care Record it will contain important information about any medicines that you are taking, allergies you suffer from and any bad reactions to medicines that you have had. Giving healthcare staff access to this information can prevent mistakes being made when caring for you in an emergency or when your GP practice is closed.
Children and the Summary Care Record
Children will automatically have a Summary care Record made for them.
If you do not want your child to have a Summary Care Record you will need to fill in an opt-out form on behalf of your child and return it to your child’s GP practice.
In some circumstances your GP may feel it is your child’s best interests to have a Summary Care Record. For example if your child has a serious allergy that healthcare staff treating your child should know about.
Your Summary Care Record Options
You can choose to have a Summary Care Record: You do not need to do anything. This will happen automatically.
You can choose not to have a Summary Care Record: You will need to let the Practice know by filling in and returning an opt-out form.
You can change your mind at any time
If you choose not to have a Summary Care Record but then change your mind later a SCR can be made for you. You will need to let the Practice know.
If you choose not to have your Summary Care Record after it has been set up, you need to complete and provide the Practice with an opt-out form.
Access To Patient Information
Confidential patient data will be shared within the practice heath care team and with other health care professionals to whom you are referred for care. Your data may be used by those clinical teams providing your care for the essential purpose of clinical audit.
Confidential patient data may also be required for the broader purposes of public health and audit, research, the provision of health care services, teaching and training. Data disclosed will be kept to the minimum required to serve the purpose and wherever possible will be anonymised before disclosure.
Confidential and identifiable patient information will not be disclosed otherwise without explicit consent, unless:
- It is a matter of life and death or serious harm to you or to another individual
- It is overwhelmingly in the public interest to do so
- There is a legal obligation to do so
In all of these circumstances the minimum identifiable information that is essential to serve the purpose may be revealed to someone with a legal entitlement to access the data for that purpose.
All individuals with access to your data have a professional and/or contractual duty of confidentiality.
If you are concerned about any of the ways in which your confidential data is used, further information is available from the practice manager. You are entitled to register an objection, which will be respected if this is possible.
Contact details for NHS Newcastle West CCG
NHS England is party to the NHS contract held by this practice. Further details of primary medical services in this area may be obtained from them at the following address:
NHS Newcastle West CCG
Riverside House,
Goldcrest
Newburn Riverside Business Park
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE15 8NY
Tel: (0191) 217 2544
Fax: (0191) 2196066
Web: www.newcastlewestccg.nhs.uk
