Summary Care Records (SCR) is a national service that allows healthcare staff free access (at the point of care) to key patient information that lives in their GP record, to help them make decisions and choices about the care they provide. The information is made available via the National Spine, which is managed and maintained by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), and is accessed by the use of an NHS Smartcard. Each SCR is created, and updated in real-time, by the GP system when a patient visits their local GP and information about them gets added, like new, or changes to, medication, for example.

Almost all (97%) of registered patients in England have an SCR with this information contained and having it readily available as part of consultations or when patients make unscheduled visits to other parts of the NHS, and indeed in other parts of the country, can play a key part in providing safe and secure clinical decisions. Patient’s SCRs are already being viewed by a number of different healthcare settings including acute Pharmacy, A&E and acute Assessment, Urgent Care Centres, Ambulance trusts and paramedics as well as telephony based services such as 111 and Out of Hours – and 60,000 patient episodes of care a week are affected by this information exchange.

The HSCIC programme that manages the development and delivery of the SCR service designed a prototype training module that has been successfully used to educate and train users across a wide variety of NHS users of the service. The team were able to build a feedback mechanism into this and have listened to users and professionals alike on their thoughts on where it would benefit from a slight re-design/refresh. Version 1.0 of the SCR elearning resource is now here and ready to be tried and tested both to inform and educate users as to what SCR is, how SCRs work, how to get access and use the service as well as how the capability has changed to give access to a much greater breadth of patient information. There are videos, sliders and enhanced viewing tools to keep the training as interactive as possible and even a short quiz to test your SCR knowledge, as well as links to further information and who to contact for help to get you up and running.

Having electronic access to patient information held in other places has been identified as a key requirement for the NHS and the Summary Care Record service can very simply and easily support you to achieve this. The service is supported and endorsed by healthcare policy and regulatory bodies as well as key national charities. This elearning resource is one way that we can deliver the message and education at scale as we believe it’s simple and straightforward, but is only part of a wider ‘blended’ learning and integration solution we can provide.

For information on how to access the SCR elearning resource visit http://www.e-lfh.org.uk/programmes/summary-care-records/.