Haughton Thornley Medical Centres’ mission statement is “There for you all your life, your good health with our support, empowering you to live well“
We encourage all patients get access to their GP electronic health records and undertanding via responsible sharing. This means:
- 80% of all our patients have already signed up for access to their records. You can easily check if a patient has signed up by looking at their Active Problems list and checking if the code “Patient Remote Record Access has been enabled” or “Patient access to e-Health record” is in there. This means at some point in the past they were consented for accessing their records
- Please ask all patients to download and install the NHS app.
- All other patients or their carers if they have access rights are invited to complete an online Records Access and Understanding safety checklist questionnaire. Please message the reception staff to inform them a questionnaire has been completed. They will then check the questionnaire results, check the patient’s record and if all checks are considered normal, the patient will be sent a message to their NHS app or a text message informing them they have been granted access to their GP electronic health records and what this means.
- If they have not heard back from the practice within 2 weeks then ask them to send an admin message to the practice so that we may follow this up.
- Encourage patients to use the practice-based web portal www.htmc.co.uk to find trusted information to help them manage their care including common problems you can solve, stay healthy, being the Best You and practice services.
Evidence demonstrates that access to records:
- increases patients’ feelings of autonomy, understanding of their health and ability to self-care
- supports patients to prepare for appointments by acting as a written reminder or record of previous interactions
- reduces the need for patients to contact general practice to get test results and referral notifications
- increase data quality within patient record by enabling patients to flag if they think there are inaccuracies in their record
- positively impacts on clinical indicators such as glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) in diabetic patients
You can learn more about why we did this, some of the fears people have for giving patients access to their records, what the challenges and opportunities are, how to write safely in the GP record and redaction tools at our disposal.
Here are the results of over 16,000 patients who have completed the online questionnaire for access to records and understanding. 82% would contact the surgery the next working day if they did not understand something and needed help.
We can empower underserved groups through access to electronic health records. This is particularly important for patients who are less likely to get access to their records such as those who have carers to look after them, elderly people, those with learning difficulties, those with severe drugs and alcohol addiction and those for whom English is a second language or who do not speak English at all.
