Health written question – answered at on 21 March 2007.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many electronic patient records she expects there to be; and how many she expects to have (a) sealed and (b) sealed and locked data on them.
In the future, each person using the national health service will have an electronic NHS care record which will be made up of detailed care records, held locally by the NHS body that provides care to the patient, and a summary care record. At the local level detailed care records will be built up over time into a comprehensive health and care history.
The objective of sealing, and sealing and locking information is to reduce the number of people who might otherwise feel the need to opt-out completely of having a summary care record because of their concern about only a small amount of sensitive information in their record. It will be open to any patient to ask to limit access to such information, including to request that specific sensitive information is accessible only with their consent. The sealed envelopes approach has the confidence of the professions in being able to provide appropriate controls for the support of patient confidentiality.
It is not possible to predict with any certainty how many people may in future choose to exercise this option as this will be the first time such an approach has ever been used. However, there is ample evidence to suggest that only a small minority would have concerns about the content of their medical records that would lead to their choosing to seal information. In response to a Consumer Association Survey (October 2002) question on this subject 60 per cent. of respondents said that they would remove nothing, around a quarter (24 per cent.) said they would remove a little, and around four per cent, said they would remove "a lot" or "all".
This is paralleled by the available evidence about the likelihood of people to opt out of having a summary care record at all. The Scottish emergency care summary, which extracts data from general practitioners' records and hospital notes, currently contains records for nearly 4.93 million patients and less than 500 have opted out. Similarly, in the course of a consultation on establishing an electronic health record in the Wirral, of patients invited to opt out if they had concerns, only 25 opted out whilst 350,000 records were uploaded. And of the 1.3 million patients likely to be affected by a similar proposal in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, only some 1,150 decided not to have their records included in the data repository.
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