With the election season officially in full swing, the political parties have published their manifestos, starting an intense campaign process.  Whichever party winds up in power following May’s election, the NHS will be subject to a number of changes that will affect the way we receive care.  Below is a run-down of the parties’ proposals [...]

Big news for electronic patient records this week. Doctors’ representative body, The British Medical Association has called for uploads to the Summary Care Records service to be halted. Smarthealthcare has the story:

The British Medical Association has written to health minister Mike O’Brien, expressing ’serious concern’ about the widespread introduction of Summary Care Records
The BMA also [...]

Liberal Democrat health spokesperson Norman Lamb laid out his party’s vision for the future of the NHS at a high profile policy speech earlier this month and had some interesting things to say about patient records systems.  Lamb’s vision is of an NHS that empowers individuals, with easy access to one’s health records and a [...]

I don’t know what 2010 holds for you, but it promises to be a big year for electronic patient records. Tuesday saw David Cameron kicking of the pre-election campaign with a speech which, amongst other things, put online records access at the heart of Conservative NHS policy.
But while Cameron’s announcement that patients will “be able [...]

The Department of Health last year ran a consultation into who should have access to patients’ medical data. More precisely, they wanted to know about ‘additional uses’ of patient records, apart from the patients’ medical care, and about the different systems which should be in place for ‘anonymised’ and ‘identifiable’ records. They had public meetings [...]

Yesterday, on the Andrew Marr show, Chancellor Alistair Darling announced the NHS IT project will be seeing serious cuts as part of a crack down on government spending. He argued that “the NHS has quite an expensive IT system that, frankly, is not essential for the front line. That’s something we do not need to [...]

Things are finally getting going for the Summary Care Record. During the last few years, there have been pilots in Bury, Bradford, Bolton, Dorset, South West Essex and South Birmingham. But now we’re leaving the trial stage behind, and aiming for roll-out across London and then the rest of England in the next few years.
It’ll [...]

Two stories that have come to our attention this week highlight a tricky aspect of electronic patient records which has been rather pushed to the sidelines.
Herefordshire is celebrating becoming the first county to integrate their NHS and council IT system in a great step forward for more joined-up public services.
Hereford’s ICT director Zack Pandor said:
If [...]

It looks like the NHS hasn’t given up on providing patients with access to their records, after all. This week Connecting for health announces they’re hoping to do more work on their patient access website Healthspace.
One of the reasons HealthSpace was shelved back in June was the low take-up of patients who chose to access [...]

It’s a little reassuring to hear we’re not the only ones who are struggling to get going with electronic patient records. The Canadians aren’t finding it easy either.
But the causes of their problems are slightly different. The Canadian government has set up a non-for-profit organization called Infoway to ensure the introduction of electronic patient records. [...]