THE SURGERY, MAIN STREET, NORTHIAM,RYE, EAST SUSSEX, TN31 6ND
Telephone: 01797 252140
Fax: 01797 252077
Online Access to Records
Online access to ordering repeat medications and appointments is now well established. The sharing of online records has been debated in the medical world and we agree that there are benefits for everyone for patients to have more access to their medical records. There is a phased national programme currently taking place. The first step is that patients will be able to see all their medications, immunisation history and allergies by the end of March 2015 and then the following year you will access to a larger part of your record.Before outlining this second phase of the project we think it would be helpful to understand how entries are put onto the computer when you attend for a consultation. The doctor writes free text describing the problem and any findings on examination and then in most cases the condition is then given a code for example tonsillitis. In the second phase of the project it is these codes of all the conditions that you have presented with which will be available online. In the forthcoming weeks we will be going live with the first part of this project and you will see that when you log into your patient access record there will be a new heading entitled Medical Record.
In the first phase of the project it is unlikely you will see any information that you are not expecting, however, next year when your full medical problem list is released there may be some information that will remind you of events in the past and this may be upsetting. If you do not want us to release your problem list online then you can let us know. It is worth emphasising that only you will be able to access your private medical records
The situation regarding access to records for people aged twelve to sixteen has been the subject of much debate. Most children in this age group will be happy to share the information in their online records with their parents. However it is also possible that there might be some information in a child’s record that they might not want their parents to know about, for example being prescribed the contraceptive pill. The recommendations from the Royal College of General Practitioners are that when a child reaches the age of twelve they should be responsible for their own computerised on-line record and therefore the policy of the practice from now on is to automatically cancel the on-line access to everyone when they reach the age of twelve and they will need to re-apply personally themselves. This is not something that we have been doing previously and in order to comply with the recommendations we are going to automatically de-register all children who currently have online records between the ages of twelve and sixteen and ask them to reapply personally. We appreciate this will cause inconvenience for some people but hopefully you will understand the reasons for doing this.