Kent and Medway Care Record

The information that will be available for professionals at our partners to view through the record is shown below. All access to information is restricted to those who have a requirement to view it for their role.

• Information such as your name, address, date of birth and NHS number
• People to contact in an emergency
• Social care assessment information
• Care providers and the services you’ve used
• Any safeguarding information designed to protect you
• Your legal status for being in the UK
• Any conditions or illnesses you’ve been diagnosed as having
• Any operations you’ve had
• Your medication
• Any alerts or risks relevant to your care
• Your medical and maternity history
• Any birth and neonatal details
• Records of care you’ve had as an inpatient or outpatient
• Your appointments
• Documents such as discharge summaries, clinical letters, care plans, risk assessments and referrals
• Results of investigations, scans and laboratory tests
• Reports such as those from radiology scans or x-rays
• Examinations, for instance, to check your blood pressure
• Trials or studies you might be part of
• If you’ve been sectioned under the Mental Health Act
• Details of supportive care, such as your end-of-life preferences
• A summary of the care you’ve had from a service, such as a hospital, when your care with that service is finished.
   

By bringing health and social care information together in one place, any authorised professional that may need to deliver treatment or care to you, will be able to have access to important information such as medication, allergies etc., more quickly without the need to contact other professionals meaning that care can be delivered at the right time, improving the quality of care provided to you. 
This could be critical in an emergency.

Historically your records are kept by individual organisations involved in your care. For example, your GP holds information about you in relation to the treatment and care that has been provided to you by your GP. Similarly, your hospital will hold a hospital record about any care or treatment you have received there. If you use adult or children’s services provided by the local authority, they too hold a separate record. 

These records have not been shared as a matter of course, so a complete picture about all of the care or treatment you have received from different professionals is not necessarily available. Bringing these electronic records together in one place will provide a more complete view of your health and care needs.

Your personal data will only be shared between the health and social care organisations that have signed the KMCR Joint Controllers Agreement (JCA) or Data Processing Agreement (DPA) to support the delivery of direct care or treatment to you. 

These include: 

• Primary care (your GP practice)
• Community services
• Mental health services
• Local authority social care departments
• Secondary care (hospitals)
• Specialist services (ambulance service)
• Hospices

Staff who need information to deliver direct care or treatment will access the KMCR through their own system where controls are applied about the level of access a member of staff is allowed to do their job and what information they can see. These same controls are applied within the KMCR, which means that a member of staff can only access information based on their authorised level of access and specific job role. Each member of staff, under contract, has a duty of confidentiality which they must abide by.

The data within the KMCR may be used for the following reasons:

• protect the vital interests of patients and service-users and those of their associated carer(s).
• support the provision of health or social care treatment or services to individuals, including their diagnosis and treatment, and the management of their care and support.
• identifying those at risk of illness and disease and to provide preventive care
• activate and empower individuals in their own care by providing a personal health record
• coordinate, improve and optimise patient flows
• help management of health or social care services
• provision of a personal health record
• grant access to treatment escalation plans
• allow use of KMCR analytics to guide care, improve allocation of resource and prevent harm to patients.

For more information about how your data is used, please see the KMCR privacy notice in the document library below.

The organisations providing your care locally are the controllers of the data they hold about you and are working in partnership to ensure it is available for sharing within the KMCR when needed to benefit your care and treatment. 

If you have any concerns about data sharing, please speak to the local care organisations who hold your records or contact: kentchft.kmcrinformationgovernance@nhs.net
 

You have a right to request information (Subject Access Request) that is held about you. To access records of your care, please contact the organisation(s) that have been or are currently providing your care, or alternatively contact kentchft.kmcrinformationgovernance@nhs.net

For more information on this or any of your rights under UK Data Protection Legislation, please see the KMCR Privacy Notice in the document library below.
 

If you have opted-out of the Summary Care Record you will not automatically be opted-out from the KMCR.

The KMCR provides a more detailed view of your health, care and treatment records and is a summary of the treatment and care provided to you by local health and social care organisations in Kent and Medway.

For more information on your opt-out rights please see the document library.

You have a legal right to lodge a GDPR objection (Article 21) with regard to your data being processed. This means that you can object to your data being shared for direct care. Your objection will be considered on a case by case basis. When reviewing your objection, consideration will be given as to whether you can still be provided with safe individual care. This is not automatic, as further information must be provided to assess whether the objection is upheld. An objection can be lodged with your GP or care provider, with the final decision being made by a clinician. 
 

Under no circumstances will your data be sold to third parties.

The system provider is contractually bound to this.

No KMCR data is processed or stored outside of the UK, which is a contractual requirement of the service provider and is in line with national standards and requirements.

Each organisation as the data controller is responsible for making sure its data is accurate and should be running reports on a regular basis to review their own data quality and identify any errors or issues, which it should then put right. 

Each organisation is its own data controller and is therefore responsible for making sure the data held by it about individuals receiving treatment and care is accurate. However, Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT) as lead commissioner for the KMCR, had established a programme team responsible for auditing the compliance of partner organisations with the agreed measures.

A governance structure has been established which is responsible for developing measures to ensure that we can review data quality across the KMCR and take measures to rectify, as appropriate, data quality issues that are identified. The governance groups are also responsible for making sure measures are in place to guarantee compliance with opt outs, consistency of data, completeness of records etc.