In our latest think-piece, Tim Smith, communications manager for Population Health Management Service for the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board, highlights the ongoing work taking place to join up records across Wessex and writes about the importance of people understanding how their records are shared. His blog include a link to a survey for people to complete on their thoughts of records being shared.
If you are reading the DCR blog, you’ll probably already know that the Dorset Care Record enables sharing of patient information by health and care professionals across the county. You may also know that Hampshire and the Isle of Wight has a similar system called the Care and Health Information Exchange (CHIE).
But ill-health doesn’t recognise lines on a map. If I live in Basingstoke but have an accident on the A35 and get taken to hospital in Bournemouth or live in Dorchester but need to visit a regional specialist unit at Southampton General Hospital, my records can’t currently be shared ‘cross-border’ for my care and treatment.
This is changing, though, as the Dorset and Hampshire/Isle of Wight systems have embarked on a programme called Wessex Care Records (WCR) to allow relevant information to be shared by health and care professionals across the counties.
There’s a strong argument that patient records should already be able to be shared nationally. At the moment, we’re adopting a ‘bottom up’ local answer for Dorset and Hampshire/Isle of Wight building on the great work and best practice from DCR and CHIE and aiming to then branch out to link further as part of a network of information sharing across different areas and boundaries.
DCR will still operate as it does now but it will be able to ‘talk to’ the shared care record across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight and vice versa. Similar approaches have been adopted elsewhere – for example across London and in Yorkshire
And there’s another benefit from the Wessex Care Records partnership. Data and insight from patient records across Wessex can potentially be analysed and used to improve patient care and services, ensure the best use is made of resources and prevent ill-health.
A lot of work is going on to make Wessex Care Records a reality. There’s a technical project to ensure that information can be shared seamlessly between DCR and CHIE, whilst information governance experts are making sure that this can happen safely and securely with the right controls in place.
But we’ve identified another important element to the programme – helping citizens to understand how their information will be shared, giving them trust and confidence in how this is done safely and securely and involving them is shaping the way we do this.
And that’s where I come in – developing a citizen engagement strategy to help us explain how patient information is shared through Wessex Care Records. I’m working closely with Tony McDougal, communications lead at DCR and his Hampshire counterpart to do this.
To make sure we’re getting our communications and engagement right, we need to have a good understanding of people’s current attitudes to how their information is shared, what would give then trust in how we do this, and where they’d prefer to get their information on this important topic.
So we’re carrying out a short citizen survey which is open until 19 August. If you live in Dorset, Hampshire or the Isle of Wight, we’d be very grateful if you could take a few minutes to complete it.