The Summary Care Record will start to hold information on end of life plans in the next few months, according to NHS Connecting for Health.
The IT agency has set out its plans to develop the SCR for end of life care and the progress that has been made at NHS Bury, one of the early adopter primary care trusts for the SCR.
Writing in the European Journal of Palliative Care, Dr Gillian Braunold, clinical director of the SCR, and colleagues from CfH, said a National Audit Office report published last year highlighted ‘severe shortcomings’ in relation to end of life care.
One of the issues it highlighted was that the wishes of people approaching the end of their life were not always conveyed to those who needed to know them.
The authors said that the SCR could “easily be used to communicate patient wishes and end-of-life care plans” because any coded information and associated free text entered in the GP IT system could be sent as part of the ‘GP summary’ to the SCR.
NHS Bury’s multidisciplinary team for palliative care currently uses a paper-based information system to communicate with GPs, consultants, the out-of-hours provider and district nursing services.
This means the information is not routinely available to other urgent care providers, such as the local hospital’s A&E department.
However, CfH and the PCT have been working with stakeholders including community specialist palliative nurses, the Macmillan hospital-based team, the hospice and the cancer local implementation team to implement end of life care wishes on SCRs. A guide has also been developed for GPs.
The authors said that over the next few months they expected that patients with all life limiting illnesses and varying disease trajectories would start having their wishes, including place of care and death, recorded in their SCR and communicated to key staff.
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