Instant access to patient records

Julie is the Workflow and Administration Team Leader at a GP practice in Birmingham, which operates across 6 different sites.

Julie's practice had more than 55,000 patient Lloyd George records scanned and stored by a third party supplier. In October 2024, these records were transferred into the National Document Repository 'Access and store digital patient documents' service by NHS England's Patient Record Management team.

Today, up to 50 administrative and clinical staff members at the practice access the service at any one time.

When the Lloyd George records were digitised and stored with a third party supplier, it could take 3 or 4 days for them to respond to our access requests. If a request is time sensitive, then you're rushing, and the worry is that you might be more likely to make a mistake.

It's instantaneous, it's made such a big difference. The other day I had a lady that had asked for her notes, and I could look at her record. Whereas before, if I needed to check something like that, it would have been very time consuming.

We've had some positive feedback from some of the partners of the GP surgery, who've said it's brilliant. If a patient presents and says they had an operation in 1982, and it's obviously not on the electronic record, the doctors now know they can double check that, even when they're talking to the patient. It's instant isn't it?

I went in [to show the admin team] and they were all a little bit "what's this going to be like?" and I sat down in front of the computer and they were like, "is that it?!".

They were all really amazed at how easy it was to use.

I just want to see more records going up there because it just makes life easy for everybody. The more people that are using it, the better it's going to be for everybody else.