§ Mr. Luceasked the Secretary of State for Social Services (1) how many people change their doctors every year;
(2) what is the procedure for transferring patients' medical records from one doctor to another;
(3) how long it takes on average to transfer medical records of a patient from one doctor to another;
154W(4) what staff is required to deal with the transfer of medical records; and what is the cost of this;
(5) whether any experiments have been carried out to speed up the method of transfer of medical records from one doctor to another.
§ Mr. MoyleAbout 3,000,000 patients change doctors each year in England and Wales. The procedure for transferring medical records begins with a patient's registration with a new doctor. If the transfer is between doctors practising within the same family practitioner committee—FPC—area, the procedure is a simple one, consisting of a transfer of records from the patient's previous doctor to his new one on request by the FPC. Where, however, the patient has previously been registered in another FPC area, the new FPC needs to refer to the National Health Service central register to find out where the patient had been registered before. The new FPC informs the old FPC of the transfer, which then has to obtain the records from the patient's previous doctor so that they may be sent to the new doctor. The time taken to complete this procedure varies widely and small delays at several points can sometimes mount up to delays of a few weeks. With several million transfers each year, it is impracticable to ascertain the average time taken. There is an emergency procedure which can be operated if a doctor needs a new patient's record urgently.
About 450 staff at FPCs deal with the transfer of medical records at a salary cost of about £938,000 a year. My Department has considered various ways of speeding up the transfer between doctors but since they would all place an extra burden on general practitioners and involve a greater degree of risk in the transmission of these confidential documents, experiments have not been pursued.
§ Mr. Luceasked the Secretary of State for Social Services whether any investigations have been made into the advantages of using computers for the transfer of medical records of a patient from one doctor to another.
155W
§ Mr. MoyleThere have not been any investigations into the direct transfer of medical records as a whole between one computer and another. One computer research and development project in the National Health Service is able to print records for the general practitioners participating; these records are structured and more legible than manuscript records and can be forwarded by those doctors to the family practitioner committee in the normal manner for onwards transmission to other doctors when necessary.