NPfIT’s GP elements to become services

The primary care elements of the National Programme for IT in the NHS will be left largely untouched by the end of the Department of Health’s review of the programme.

GP Systems of Choice, Choose and Book, the Electronic Prescription Service and GP2GP record transfer will all continue. A DH spokesperson told EHI Primary Care that they were now seen as “part of ongoing operations of the NHS.”

The programmes will cease to be managed as projects but as IT services under the control of the NHS.

The success of GPSoC and its popularity with GPs led the DH to target the removal of GP functionality from some local service provider contracts when it was looking for savings last year.

The Summary Care Record is being examined as part of a separate review which is due to report in a few weeks’ times. However, EHI primary Care understands that the review is not looking at whether the SCR should be scrapped but at two specific elements of the roll-out.

The review is examining what information should be held on the SCR and how patients can best be informed about the programme.

The first part of the review is consulting with clinicians on whether ‘enriched’ information should be added to the SCR following the basic upload of allergies, adverse reactions and medications and, if that does happen, how that should be handled.

Enrichment of the record was one of the concerns raised by the BMA and UCL’s independent evaluation of the SCR, which highlighted the difficulty of defining a minimum dataset of key data which should be included in the SCR.

The evaluation team, bed by Professor Trisha Greenhalgh, said enrichment did not lend itself to resolution by high-level committees but might be better handled by local health communities.

The second element of the review is examining the appropriateness of the information patients receive about the SCR before records are uploaded and how patients’ preferences are recorded.

Moves to accelerate the roll-out of the SCR earlier in the year led to concerns that patients were not being adequately informed before records were uploaded or given an adequate opportunity to opt-out.

Public Information Programmes for the SCR have been suspended while the review goes on although uploads are continuing with the latest figures showing that 2.7m records had been created by the beginning of this month.