Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what plans his Department has for widening the use of NHS Digital to enable pharmacists to update a patient's health record.

Pharmacists working across a range of care settings are able to update patient records. In particular the general practice clinical pharmacist programme is funding 2,000 pharmacists over four years to work alongside general practitioners (GPs) and nurses in general practice with read/write access to patient health records.

Clinical pharmacists in hospital practice also have read/write access to hospital patient records to support clinical practice.

In some areas, community pharmacists have been given read/write access to support working with general practices particularly linked to any prescribing role they have.

In addition, 96% of community pharmacists in England have now been provided with read access to the summary care record, which provides a summary of the data in the patient’s general practice record. In addition, 80% have now been provided with a secure NHSmail account which allows safe and secure communication between the pharmacist and the GP practice regarding patient encounters.

Further work is underway to develop a solution that integrates updates recorded by a pharmacist directly into the GP record. This will take time to develop and implement due to the complexity involved.