Health Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Sureena Brackenridge and Joe Robertson

Tuesday 16th June 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Joe Robertson]

Q If responsibility for managing and safeguarding the single patient record is to sit with general practice, if that is what the Government want, can you tell us, Kay Keane, as chair of the Institute of General Practice Management, what the implication would be for workload, and particularly workforce, in practice management?

Kay Keane: I think it is impossible, really, for me to understand that. It is a large part of our job already. As Dr Dickson said, we act as a small business. We do all the things that any other small business does, so being able to manage that record on top of that would take a huge amount of investment into general practice.

I would argue that maybe the investment into general practice should not be on data, but should be in the wider workforce. We are really good at looking after our data now. We care about it, we hold it close to the care of the patient and we share it only when appropriate, but in our view to then be the data controller of other information is too much and is unmanageable for a general practice to do.

Equally, our data is very personal to us, and we want to keep hold of that. We do not want our patients worrying about the stories that they tell us, so a model where we feed into something else and have responsibility for the bit that it is fed into sits more comfortably with the Institute of General Practice Management.

Dr Dickson: I do not have much to add to that. The devil is in the detail of where it sits and how we reassure patients that we are trusted with their data—that we are sharing what they have given us appropriately for their health, but not for spurious reasons. I think people’s understanding is that we share an awful lot more than we do, so there is a gap. People perceive that we are going to overshare, whereas actually this will allow us to come up to the level that we should be at.

[Sureena Brackenridge]

Q My question is to Dr Dickson and is about education and training policy, responsibility for which will be transferred from NHS England to the Secretary of State. I know that you have a lot of interest in medical training and education, so what do you feel would be the impact?

Dr Dickson: I think the impact could be really positive. At the moment, we train nationally to high standards, so that the product of medical education can be deployed anywhere in the UK, and we are also all trained to develop, innovate, change the service and move forward. What we miss at the moment is parity of esteem for education as a productivity function of the NHS. There is the productivity function of elective care, waiting times, cancer treatment and all those things, but education must sit at that level of esteem for productivity for all professions in order for the service to continue—not to innovate, change and develop, but just to continue. Moving things to the Secretary of State gives us a chance to ensure that that pure parity is seen. The danger is that if you move the function in, it gets lost in the service productivity sphere. There is a huge opportunity to firmly embed the education and strategic development of different roles as a true productivity function of the NHS, which it needs to be.