Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of implementing a mandatory care marker for care workers on their GP record.

The Department has not undertaken a formal assessment of introducing a mandatory care marker for those employed as care workers on general practice records. Any request for new coding would need to consider the purpose and proportionality of the introduction for employed care staff, and the impact on general practice.

There are existing SNOMED, the structured clinical vocabulary for use in an electronic health record, and clinical term codes which can be used to indicate a person’s unpaid caring role on their health record.