Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many medical record envelopes have been received by GP surgeries during April to September 2016.

The movement of medical records between general practitioner (GP) practices and long term storage is managed by Primary Care Support England (PCSE), provided by Capita. PCSE moves an average of 90,000-100,000 Medical Record Envelopes each week. Historically there has been no end to end tracking facility in place to provide information on the volumes of medical records that are received by GP practices. GP surgeries have their own clinical systems where they may record receipt of medical record envelopes however NHS England does not have access to those systems so is unable to provide data which shows numbers received.

There have been two incidents of Medical Record Envelopes arriving damaged or with missing files recorded by PCSE using the Information Governance Toolkit. NHS England has received some emails from practices indicating damage to the sacks which contain records. These do not constitute Information Governance incidents as there has been no disclosure of patient information. However, they could be considered as a ‘near miss’ and reported as such.

Any patient who has ever registered with a GP practice in England has a paper primary care medical record held in a Lloyd George envelope.