There’s no denying that technology has changed the way we live day-to-day, so you may be surprised to hear that it was only fairly recently that health and care organisations across the UK, that provide patient care started to share data with one another (within local footprints known as integrated care systems, or ICSs), to help improve the care of local people.
In Cheshire and Merseyside, these changes began in 2019, when Share2Care was first introduced as part of NHSX's drive to establish Local Health and Care Records (LHCRs). With the main aim of LHCRs being to improve outcomes for patients and service users like you, by ensuring that health and care professionals are able to access information about their patients (such as current and historical medications, clinic letters and discharge summaries) to support them in their decision making with regards to direct care.
Not only does access to this information help clinicians to deliver safe, effective and efficient care to you as their patients, but it can also enable them to identify gaps in care and drive insight work such as proactive prevention and in the design or improvement of local services. Outcomes, which have been particularly beneficial and apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, when services and staff were stretched due to a rise in the number of COVID-related hospital admissions, and healthcare professionals needed to be able to access patient data with ease.