REGO new feature – Summary Care Record
8 January 2024
08 January 2024
Dear Colleague,
We are writing to you to inform you of an upgrade feature to the REGO referral system which will allow a patient’s summary care record to be attached to your referral. Hospital consultants have requested this feature, to provide better care and treatment of your patients and to speed up processing of referrals in their triage of all referrals.
Activation of this facility will allow you, as the referrer, to access this summary care record, which will be new to you, although you may know a lot of the information contained in it. In many cases you will not need to look at the information yourself but it is of vital importance in some referrals to secondary services
As with all other electronic referral platforms which allow access to patient information, we must seek patient consent. It is important to understand this is a summary, not the patient’s full medical history.
The summary care record contains:
-
-
- Name and address
- Date of Birth
- NHS number
- Current repeat medication
- Allergies and adverse reaction
- Discontinued repeat medications
- Acute medication issued
-
As you can see from above, we would need to ask for patient consent for most of this information as part of a routine eye examination. See link for further information on summary care records:
NHS England » Summary Care Records (SCR)
What will change:
Before sending a referral, you will need to complete a consent declaration by clicking ’Yes‘ or ‘No‘ depending on the patient’s preference. The screen shot below shows an example of the screen you will see when making the referral.
We understand that optometrists may not complete the submission of the referral with the patient present and may submit the referral later. It is therefore very important to get verbal confirmation from the patient when discussing the referral with them before they leave your premises or else you will need to confirm with the patient later before you send the referral. If for any reason the patient does not give consent, the referral can still be sent but the summary care record will not be attached and this may delay action by the providers as they need to seek more information.
In addition, there may be rare occasions when the patient does not have capacity to give consent Where there are concerns about the patient’s capacity to give consent, (eg if the person has dementia and is unaccompanied by a carer/responsible adult) and the optometrist may regard that it is in the best interests of the patient for the secondary care to see the SCR, please use the ’Emergency access‘ button. This special button facility should not be used for normal referrals where the patient can give their own consent and the Yes/No buttons should be used.
By using the Emergency access button, summary care records will be provided to the hospital. This will allow the referring optometrist to see the summary records during any dialogue with the hospital.
Yours faithfully,
Dimple Mehta, NHSE Southeast Specialty Lead for Optometry
Dr David Chapman, ICB Clinical Lead for POD
Dr Abid Irfan, Director of Primary Care and Deputy Chief Medical Officer Buckingham, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West Integrated Care Board
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