We are constantly keeping our records up to date so would like to ask a few questions about your health records.
Patients have the option to share their health records and information with other services that are providing them care. You also have the option to allow services to share this information with us. All the information recorded by other health care professionals forms an important part of your record and it is useful for all healthcare professionals involved in your care to be able to see everything so that they can provide the most appropriate care.
This is known as Sharing In and Sharing Out. Consent must be given at each organisation that treats you and you can change your preference at any time.
Your health record becomes a “pool” of information and you can choose who can add into the “pool” and who can see information from it.
This image helps explain how your information could be shared or not shared.
In this example;
Your GP and the District Nurse can see all the information on your shared record and all the information recorded by your GP and the District Nurse is added to the shared record.
The Smoking Clinic, however, can see the information from your shared record but the information recorded by the Smoking Clinic will not be added to your shared record so will not be seen by anyone else.
If we do not have this information recorded already for a patient, people working at our practice will see a pop up box asking for a patients consent to share. This is the information we must complete:
Sharing Out means that information recorded at our practice will be shared with other healthcare providers that you see BUT ONLY if you agree to allow the other healthcare provider to share in.
Sharing In means that we can see information recorded at other healthcare providers BUT ONLY if you agree to those healthcare providers to share out from their organisation.
We cannot override consent so we must ensure that sharing options are up to date all the time.