Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government whether they will place in the Library of the House a copy of any findings or outcomes of the exploratory work completed by NHS England that is described in the National Data Guardian’s Annual Report for 2023–2024 on the topic of adding a patient-facing function to GP Connect to enable people to see who has accessed their health records.

Following the initial discussion with the National Data Guardian, NHS England decided not to pursue the topic of adding a patient-facing function to GP Connect. It would have had a limited application and been technically and legally complex to implement, as noted in section 6.7.4 of the National Data Guardian 2023-2024 report, and would not have provided sufficient benefit, additional to the existing function of Subject Access Requests. There was, therefore, no exploratory work completed on this subject.

There are multiple ways for a patient’s record to be accessed. Any patient-facing feature needs to take all these different routes into account and, as noted by the National Data Guardian, NHS England is considering whether this functionality might be possible in the Government’s plans for a single care record.