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Medical Records: Paper

Answer

The movement of medical records between general practitioner (GP) practices and long term storage is managed by Primary Care Support England (PCSE), provided by Capita. PCSE moves an average of 90,000-100,000 Medical Record Envelopes each week. Historically there has been no end to end tracking facility in place to provide information on the volumes of medical records that are received by GP practices. GP surgeries have their own clinical systems where they may record receipt of medical record envelopes however NHS England does not have access to those systems so is unable to provide data which shows numbers received.

There have been two incidents of Medical Record Envelopes arriving damaged or with missing files recorded by PCSE using the Information Governance Toolkit. NHS England has received some emails from practices indicating damage to the sacks which contain records. These do not constitute Information Governance incidents as there has been no disclosure of patient information. However, they could be considered as a ‘near miss’ and reported as such.

Any patient who has ever registered with a GP practice in England has a paper primary care medical record held in a Lloyd George envelope.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

53830

Session

2016-17

Grouped for answer

Yes

Subjects

Medical records Paper

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk