‘Pull the plug’ on Summary Care Records, says GPC IT lead
Madlen Davies writes in Pulse, a news magazine for GPs:
The Summary Care Record programme should be scrapped because only a small proportion of records are being accessed and the current utilisation rate means each viewing to date has effectively cost an estimated £1,200, the GPC’s IT lead has said.
Dr Paul Cundy, chair of the GPC’s information technology subcommittee and a GP in Wimbledon, south London, said that while almost 23 million Summary Care Records (SCRs) have been created, they are being accessed in just 98 of the several thousand institutions such as out-of-hours services and hospitals eventually intended to use them.
In an exclusive interview with Pulse as part of our Big Interview series, Dr Cundy said he believed the Government should ‘pull the plug’ on the entire SCR programme, although he later stressed he had been speaking in a personal capacity and that the BMA’s policy remained that the SCR should ‘stand on its merits’.
