Hooray, the SCR is nearly with us

The massed ranks of the British Medical Association, Liberty, the Patients' Alliance and No2ID are squealing that the roll-out of the Summary Care Record is happening too fast. I find this a bit rich. I, a patient, have been waiting patiently for eight years for a proper care record system in the NHS, in the hope that the doctors who treat me will have immediate access to my medical history, so that they can treat me appropriately. At last, at last, I am delighted to hear that the SCR is rolling out to somewhere near me real soon. Mark you, I consider the SCR to be pretty small beer, giving as it does just a list of allergies, medications and contraindications. But it is a start. A proper record may follow – or it may not if the Tories have their wicked way. As I have expounded elsewhere in these columns, I am told that 4,000 to 7,000 patients are killed every year by "inappropriate treatments". I don't want to be one of them, and it seems to me that the SCR is one of the measures that will stop doctors killing patients. So I am puzzled why the BMA, Liberty, the Patients Alliance and No2ID seem almost to encourage this massacre. They seem to have their priorities in a tangle. What is more important, saving lives or protecting one's own privacy? The BMA's letter to health minister Mike O'Brien claims that "a significant number of members" of the BMA's GP committee are calling for a boycott of uploading patient information onto the Spine to create SCRs. Have the committee's members asked their patients whether they want their details withheld? I doubt it. Phil Booth of No2ID asserts: "Though the vast majority of GPs and the public opposed the uploading of patients' information without explicit consent, Connecting for Health pushed on regardless, uploading the details of anyone who failed to respond to a single letter." Was "the vast majority of GPs and the public opposed"? How does he have the brass neck to make this claim? Implicit consent is good enough for me and most lazy patients. Liberty is similarly emotive: "But the worst of all worlds is to alleviate political criticism by providing a so-called opt-out which is inaccessible and virtually meaningless." This is nonsense; there is nothing "so-called" or inaccessible about the opt-out. I have read through the 'Changes to your health records' booklet, and would have no problem in ringing my GP or filling in the opt-out form if I were so inclined, which I am not. Patients on retrovirals or with other particularly sensitive conditions are not stupid. They will have no difficulty in opting out under the proposed system. Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, says there "should have been a national advertising campaign so people could start thinking whether to participate or not". On that, she is right. A fair-minded advertising campaign could nail some of the rubbish churned out by the nay-sayers. One of the most absurd arguments against the SCR I have heard recently comes from GPs. They claim that the data in many of the existing records about allergies and medications are inaccurate and therefore misleading. I can imagine that this is the case, knowing the cavalier approach that medics have to filling out records. Physician, heal thyself. They should learn to be more accurate. They might even check with patients that the data is accurate. Perhaps, who knows, one beneficial unintended consequence of the SCR will be that medics will become less sloppy about record-keeping. The data will be accurate, for the first time in British medicine. And lives will be saved thereby.