Pharmacist and MP Sadik Al-Hassan has proposed to the Department of Health and Social Care (DH) a new NHS-owned patient medication record (PMR) system that would link up patient data across all of primary and secondary care.
The Labour MP for North Somerset and former PillTime superintendent told C+D the project - named “Project Bevan” as a nod to chief architect of the NHS Aneurin Bevan - goes further than the single patient record (SPR) that was formally introduced in the NHS Modernisation Bill last month.
SPR “not ambitious enough”
“The SPR that No. 10 and the health service is looking at is the link of some secondary care data parts and GP services,” Al-Hassan said.
“I don’t think that’s ambitious enough. I think it needs to be all of primary care to have a good view of the patient.”
Al-Hassan said he has presented to the DH a proposal for a “single architecture” that would sit under primary care, and is “what we need to have a true SPR”.
Read more: Big Interview: Sadik Al-Hassan on the fractured nature of pharmacy politics
“If I’m making a decision on somebody’s medicines, I need to know what the discussion was with their optometrist, what happened with the dentist, with the GP and in secondary care,” he added.
He would also need to know “what the patient fed back”, he said, which requires read and write access to patient records.
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Al-Hassan said he has presented Project Bevan to the previous and current health secretary to “try and put that vision into life”.
And he added that it “could be done and ready in a GP surgery in three years”.
But with the SPR itself not expected to roll out until at least 2028, he admitted that “government ambition needs to match the challenge”.
“We can do so much better”
Al-Hassan, who is also the chair of the parliamentary All-Party Pharmacy Group on Pharmacy, wrote about the proposal for an NHS-owned PMR system in a paper published in January and sent to “health-focused MPs” and “senior politicians”.
The paper sets out Al-Hassan’s vision for primary care in 2040, and explores how the sector can evolve by integrating community pharmacy and general practice.
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“I thought it was about time that somebody laid out a vision of what pharmacy is going to be,” he said.
“Now it’s time for everybody else in the sector to tell me where I’m wrong, where I’m right and where I can do better,” he added.
“I’ve already seen 20 years of what happens when somebody else dictates the future of pharmacy, and we can do so much better.”
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You can read more about Al-Hassan’s 2040 vision for community pharmacy, and why he believes the last two pharmacy contracts were “phenomenal”, in an exclusive interview that will be published on C+D on June 29.
