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NHS accused of politicising health records
Take the money and run
Figures from Connecting for Health reveal that dozens of primary care trusts took money to tell patients about summary care records, even though they had no intention of actually moving to such records.
Some 70 PCTs took money to run publicity campaigns for Summary Care Records (SCR) - you might even have got such a letter from your GP yourself.
But out of those 70 trusts only nine have gone on to upload records. The money was available for trusts as long as they sent out letters before March 2010. About £7m was spent by health trusts in London.
The accusation is that the letters were little more than propaganda to show the Labour Party was taking real action to modernise the health service, even in PCTs which had no immediate plans to feed records into the system.
More from Tony Collins' blog here.
It has also emerged that GPs are not the only people who can create Summary Care Records.
Documents issued following Freedom of Information requests show that accident and emergency departments and outpatient facilities can also create the records, E-Health Insider reports.
The real fate of the SCR programme will not be known until the general election is over. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
