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Pushing the boundaries

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Pushing the boundaries

Access to the Summary Care Record is great, but patients need much more, says Noel Wicks

As expected, the national media have been having a field day fabricating stories about the pharmacy corporates using the data for nefarious marketing purposes. When I think about it, the irony is that it’s the NHS that would benefit from the data that the corporates generate, not the other way round. This data could help the NHS gain an understanding of patients and the way they lead their life.

I suspect that a person’s shopping habits, be it food and drink or medicines and healthcare, could certainly be as useful as the information available in an SCR. That aside, what will access to the SCR do for community pharmacy?

In it’s most basic sense it will provide pharmacy a limited glimpse of what the NHS believes represents the patient. I say ‘believes’ because my experiences of most types of records systems are that they are only as good as those updating them.

So, moving past the obvious benefits of access from a clinical perspective, then what else could SCR access do for pharmacy? For me, I think the biggest benefit is that it gives us the foot in the door to the inner circle of the NHS. The ability to look at, and perhaps eventually create records on the NHS database, is crucial to improving the role of the pharmacist.

In my opinion, this is just one of the tools that could make a real difference to what community pharmacy can deliver. It’s through electronic solutions like this that I believe pharmacy will achieve true integration in the NHS and the ability to better influence patient care. The current discussions about pharmacists working in GP surgeries also seem, for a large part, to be a back door strategy to gain access to closer working.

While it could be argued that access, however gained, is still access, I think we could end up kidding ourselves that we’ve achieved our goal for pharmacy. In fact, a risk is that we end up believing that having a few hundred pharmacists working in GP surgeries would be the same as having over 12,000 pharmacies (and pharmacists) contributing daily and visibly to a patient’s NHS data and care.

The SCR access therefore represents much more than just a glimpse into an NHS file. It has the potential to revolutionise the role of pharmacy and the pharmacist. Are there any barriers to the accessing of the SCR or indeed NHS patient records as a whole? If you were to read the tabloids, then they would have you believe that patients are highly suspicious of anyone other than their own doctor looking at their records. But the reality is that I experience on a daily basis patients’ incredulity that I can’t see what’s on the GP’s computer, particularly when it comes to prescriptions that have been issued.

The simple fact is that patients expect joined up technology and data availability that works around them. So, let’s keep on pushing to get that across the entire pharmacy network.

Noel Wicks is an independent pharmacist.

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