CCG News

A closer look at the Connecting Care local record

The award winning Connecting Care local record (Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset) aims to provide a shared local patient-centric record to support patient care. The patient summary can be accessed by health and social care across their locality (Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset) and includes details from GPs, information from community, social care and mental health teams, information about End of Life Wishes and other information under one system.

The system provides a shared local patient-centric record to support direct patient care and local care co-ordination. This includes:

  • A summary from the GP record including appointments, diagnoses, medications, allergies  and immunisations
  • Information about contacts with out of hours, hospital, community, social care and mental health
  • Information about End of Life wishes
  • ‘Practice inpatients ’ view for GPs
  • More projects will add to this in the future e.g. safeguarding for children information and personal health records

Head of Information and Performance at South Gloucestershire CCG Thomas Manning said, “Connecting Care shares real-time patient data between GPs, community providers, local authorities and three acute trusts through a secure portal. This means that Clinicians and practitioners working in hospitals, community settings, GP practices, out-of-hours services and social care can view a single electronic record for the person receiving care.”

“It has been a major challenge to work on such a complex technology project involving a large number of partner organisations. We are delighted that we have been able to come together to provide this excellent resource for local health services and hope that it can help to provide joined up healthcare for the area.“

The Connecting Care programme was a truly multi-agency project with all of the organisations below involved:

Bristol Clinical Commissioning Group, North Somerset Clinical Commissioning Group, South Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group, Bristol City Council, North Somerset Council, South Gloucestershire Council, North Bristol NHS Trust, University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust, Weston Area Health NHS Trust, GP Practices in South Gloucestershire, North Somerset and Bristol, Bristol Community Health, North Somerset Community Partnership, Sirona Care and Health (South Gloucestershire), BrisDoc, Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust, Bristol Mental Health,South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust, West of England Academic Health and Science Network, South, Central and West Commissioning Support Unit.