EXCLUSIVE

Pharmacists have branded an estimated five-year wait before they can amend patient records as "too long".

If a pilot to give pharmacies in five regions read-only access to the summary care record (SCR) this year is a success, it will be rolled out to all pharmacies within two years, with full read-write access within five years, said Emyr Jones, the Health and Social Care Information Centre's clinical lead for the project.

But LPC leaders and contractors urged the government to speed up the process, which they said would improve pharmacy services and save patients from repeating information to different healthcare professionals.

Two-thirds of 97 respondents to a C+D poll carried out between September 8 and 10 said that five years was too long to wait and pharmacy was ready for the responsibility now.

However, one-third of readers thought the sector should be "patient" and give the government time to develop a "fully functioning" system.

Dr Jones said the SCR would become a "different beast" over the next five years. "It will become more than a summary, it will have input from other settings," he told C+D at a parliamentary event last week (September 3).

Pharmacists would "absolutely" be able to input information into the records, which would also contain a wider range of diagnostic data, he added.

Nottingham LPC chief officer Nick Hunter said complex services involving many healthcare professionals – such as the monitoring of dementia patients – would be improved if pharmacists were able to add their findings to patient records.

"We should try to do it sooner. We definitely need to move forward on this and [having no] access to a common record is holding everybody back, not just pharmacy," he said.  

Patients were "fed up" of having to repeat the same details to different healthcare professionals and would often miss out vital information. Having a common record that pharmacists could add to would reduce this risk, he said.

Graham Phillips, owner of Manor Pharmacy Group (Wheathampstead) Ltd, said that full read-write access should be built into the initial SCR roll-out in two years' time or it risked becoming "irrelevant" as technology moved on.

Ravi Sharma, a primary care pharmacist at healthcare provider DMC Healthcare, said doctors would be "quite receptive" to allowing pharmacists to add to patient records.

Innovation in pharmacy was often "overshadowed" in favour of other projects, he said: "I wish there was a pilot to show how a pharmacist could amend it and the positive effect it could have."

Pharmacy Voice chief executive Rob Darracott told C+D he did not expect read-write access to be "tied up in a quick meeting", but called on the sector to "support" the process.

The SCR pilot will involve between 80 and 100 pharmacies across West Yorkshire, North Derbyshire, Northamptonshire, Somerset and Sheffield, NHS England told C+D last month. It will be launched in the autumn and the results are scheduled to be published in early 2015.  

	How long do you think it will be before pharmacists have read-write access to patient records?