New contractual requirements came into force from 1 April 2014 requiring that GP Practices should make available a statement of intent in relation to the following IT developments:

• Summary Care Record (SCR)
• GP to GP Record Transfers
• Patient Online Access to Their GP Record
• Data for commissioning and other secondary care purposes

The same contractual obligations require that we have a statement of intent regarding these developments in place and publicised by 30 September 2014.
Please find below details of the practices stance with regards to these points.

Summary Care Record (SCR)

NHS England require practices to enable successful automated uploads of any changes to patient’s summary information, at least on a daily basis, to the summary care record (SCR) or have published plans in place to achieve this by 31st of March 2015.
Having your Summary Care Record (SCR) available will help anyone treating you without your full medical record. They will have access to information about any medication you may be taking and any drugs that you have a recorded allergy or sensitivity to.
Of course if you do not want your medical records to be available in this way then you will need to let us know so that we can update your record. You can do this via the opt out form.
The practice confirms that your SCR is automatically updated on at least a daily basis to ensure that your information is as up to date as it can possibly be.

GP to GP Record Transfers

NHS England require practices to utilise the GP2GP facility for the transfer of patient records between practices, when a patient registers or de-registers (not for temporary registration).
It is very important that you are registered with a doctor at all times. If you leave your GP and register with a new GP, your medical records will be removed from your previous doctor and forwarded on to your new GP via NHS England. It can take your paper records up to two weeks to reach your new surgery.
With GP to GP record transfers your electronic record is transferred to your new practice much sooner.
The practice confirms that GP to GP transfers are already active and we send and receive patient records via this system.

Patient Online Access to Their GP Record

NHS England require practices to promote and offer the facility to enable patients online access to appointments, prescriptions, allergies and adverse reactions or have published plans in place to achieve this by 31st of March 2015.
We currently offer the facility for booking and cancelling appointments and also for ordering your repeat prescriptions and viewing  a summary of your medical records on-line. If you do not already have a user name and password for this system – please register your interest  with our reception staff.

Data for commissioning and other secondary care purposes

It is already a requirement of the Health and Social Care Act that practices must meet the reasonable data requirements of commissioners and other health and social care organisations through appropriate and safe data sharing for secondary uses.

The Practice confirm these arrangements are in place and that we undertake annual training and audits to ensure that all our data is handled correctly and safely via the Information Governance Toolkit.

Read the information provided by NHS East and North Hertfordshire CCG about how we use your data:

• Fair Processing Poster
• Fair Processing Leaflet
• Fair Processing Notices – FAQs
• Your Data Matters
• Our Data Protection Policy

We operate a zero tolerance policy for both physical and/or verbal abuse against all our members of staff and patients. We aim to treat patients with courtesy at all times and expect patients to show similar respect towards our staff.

We take all threatening, abusive and violent behaviour very seriously. Should a patient act in a manner which is considered to be violent or abusive all necessary steps will be taken to protect the well being of all staff and patients of Knebworth and Marymead Medical Practice.

In extreme cases we have the right to remove abusive patients from our practice list with immediate effect.

In this situation we will notify the patient in writing of their removal from the list and record in the patient’s medical records the fact of the removal and the circumstances leading to it.

All regular patients are allocated a “Usual GP”. This is the named accountable general practitioner who is responsible for your overall care at the practice.
If you are a registered patient, but are unsure who your usual GP is, you should contact your surgery.

If you wish to change your usual GP, please put your request in writing, FAO Operations Manager. If you have a preference as to which GP you would prefer, the practice will make reasonable efforts to accommodate this request. However, this may not always be possible and we may have to assign a different GP.