Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to ensure that the IT systems used by (a) GPs and (b) community pharmacists enable the provision of one set of patient records.

The Delivery plan for recovering access to primary care announced plans to significantly improve the digital infrastructure between general practices (GPs) and community pharmacies. This will see GPs and community pharmacies viewing and contributing to a single patient record via their respective IT systems. For example, the functionality to update the GP patient record will see pharmacy consultation outcomes arriving directly into the GP’s workflow for review and action, which will be rolled out in April and May 2024. The functionality to view all required information from the GP patient record from within the community pharmacy clinical system, will be rolled out in summer.