Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what changes have been made to the Defence Medical Information Capability Programme in relation to (a) regular and (b) reserve personnel since 2014; and if he will make a statement.

The Defence Medical Information Capability Programme (DMICP) provides electronic primary healthcare records for all serving personnel, their dependants in some overseas locations and civilian staff deployed in support of operations. The Ministry of Defence works closely with the DMICP software provider to deliver enhancements that reduce the risk to patient safety, irrespective of who the patient is, and reflect legislative changes.

Since 2014 a number of minor changes have been made to the DMICP, such as adding new medical practices to the system. More significant changes have also been made, including, but not limited to:

• Enabling the monitoring and reporting of performance against the General Medical Services contract Quality and Outcomes Framework. This supports the management of some of the most common chronic diseases.

• A new joint system for recording an individual's medical deployability status.

• The deployed version of DMICP has benefited from new hardware and enhancements to the software.

• An interface between DMICP and the new NHS messaging service, providing electronic delivery of pathology reports from NHS and other laboratories.

• A new DMICP training system, allowing more users to be trained and a wider range of training courses to be provided.