New technology makes local records sharing easier

ShareforYou is a new way of working to support organisations involved in your care in Bury, Oldham, Heywood Middleton and Rochdale area

A new digital care record solution, called Graphnet CareCentric, will enable local care providers to view each other’s up-to-date records, providing the a fuller picture of a person’s health and social care needs.

The roll out of CareCentric is due to ‘go live’ towards the end of September and it forms a second stage to the sharing programme known locally as Share for You.

There will be further stages to the programme that will link up children’s records that will be accessible by practitioners involved in the care of local children and care homes within the borough.

Dr Venkatesh Mallya, GP in Littleborough Group Practice and clinical lead for the Share for You programme said; “This technology has the potential to achieve enormous benefits for health and social care as it allows appropriate practitioners to see all the records associated with their patient. It takes the pressure off the patient as they don’t need to recall other details to relay to a new professional and it takes any guess work out of care for the practitioner.”

Share for You recognises that not all people in Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale may want their details to be shared in this way.  If people have any concerns they can talk to their GP practice and if necessary they can be opted out of the process via their surgery.

Dr Mallyaadded: “Anyone who opts out of the programme will leave their care providers at a disadvantage as it means they won’t have access to as much information as they could to ensure their care is safe and streamlined.”

The organisations that will be involved in the sharing arrangement are the GPs within the area of NHS Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale Clinical Commissioning Group, Rochdale Borough Council adult care services, the Northern Care Alliance (Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust), Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, BARDOC Out of hours GP services and Springhill Hospice.