Giving control to patients.

The editorial ‘Confidentiality and Connecting for Health’1 asked GPs to support a campaign to encourage patients to opt-out of the NHS Care Record Service. That editorial contained a number of factual errors and wrongly conflated aspects of the National Programme for IT with existing systems and their controls. In this editorial we aim to set out the current situation of the Summary Care Record (SCR) and describe the strong control that patients are able to exercise over use of the content and use of their health information. We also aim to address any misconceptions that may have been generated. The primary purpose of the SCR is to improve patient care by ensuring that limited but important clinical information is available in circumstances where the full records are not available. Having a summary set of information in these circumstances ensures a patient's care is not prejudiced because key information is inaccessible in a ‘digital island’ elsewhere within the health service. It is expected that this will be of most use in emergency departments and out-of-hours services. In addition, we expect that many patients will elect to have access to their own records and contribute personal health information through the confidential and secure website Healthspace (www.healthspace.nhs.uk). This allows patients to check the accuracy of the information held and truly makes patients partners in their own health care. As with everything in the SCR, accessing it is entirely optional for …