Information Governance Framework for Integrated Health and Care: Shared Care Records

Having the right information at the right time, in the hands of health and care professionals, saves lives. Health and care professionals need access to patient and service user records to understand their needs and make the best decisions. To enable this, we need to integrate care records across GPs, hospitals, community services and social care rather than each organisation holding information separately in silos. During the pandemic, we have seen how critical information sharing is. We need to build upon this, ensuring that all those caring for a patient or service user have timely access to relevant information. The Caldicott Principles set out that the duty to share information for individual care is as important as the duty to protect confidentiality. Through this IG Framework, we aim to empower local areas to feel confident that this principle is being implemented so that patients and service users truly benefit from joined up care.

NHS England has made it clear that each Integrated Care System (ICS) needs to "develop or join a shared care record joining data safely across all health and social care settings, both to improve direct care for individual patients and service users, and to underpin population health and effective system management".

The content of an individual’s health and care record will be based on professionally agreed standards developed by the Professional Records Standards Body (PRSB). This is called the Core Information Standard. Professionals across a wide range of different sectors, as well as patients, service users and carers have been involved in the development of this standard. They have suggested what information should be recorded at various points of care, from birth, through life events, maternity and end of life, and how it should be done.

The standard will support front-line health and care professionals to access the pertinent information about an individual. It will enable health and care professionals to:

• view a consolidated medication record
• run algorithms where there may be gaps in care, for example, child overdue for immunisation
• identify individuals at risk
• proactively notify other health and care professionals

This will be underpinned by controls to ensure that information is secure.

The invitation to participate in the LHCR (now ShCR) programme promised: "This will all be undertaken within a consistent national Framework of IG, which will assist exemplars to meet their legal obligations".

This document, written in a practical style for IG professionals, provides the promised IG Framework. It will help them to ensure that health and care data is used in an appropriate and transparent manner. It will support ShCRs to ensure that data sharing complies with:

• statute
• common law
• the values set out in the NHS Constitution and enshrined in the provision of social care
• professional standards and guidelines on sharing information as set out for health and care staff

The IG Framework will also be helpful for all those who are involved in using health and care information generated by individual ShCRs. It provides advice around some of the complex areas which will be relevant to ShCRs such as joint controllership and considering a patient's or service user's choices about how their data is used. It provides tools and templates for organisations to use, refer to Appendix 7. It will help ShCRs to develop their IG capabilities and build trust with the people they serve.

The IG Framework will be a working document which evolves over time to meet the needs of those who use it. It will be updated as required to take into account operational experience and any changes to policy, technology and the law.

In association with this IG Framework, technical architecture capability documents have been prepared (you will need to sign in). These set out the system functionality to be developed including user authentication, care record access audit, role based access controls and handling individual’s preferences.