Connecting your Care FAQs

Connecting your Care brings together health and care services to improve the way information about you is shared to ensure that it is quickly and safely available to the people who need to see it when they are providing you with care or services.

Connecting your Care provides health and care professionals with an instant access, read-only “connected electronic view” of the important information that is helpful to them when they are providing you directly with care or services.

Quick access to this information not only helps them but may also save you time in not having to keep repeating yourself or having to have repeat tests/appointments. Health and care professionals will be better able to quickly make decisions about your care. Sometimes this information can be critical when helping you in an emergency.

• Important information is immediately visible to the people caring for you, when they are caring for you
• Decisions about your care can be made quickly
• You will only have to tell your story once then other health and care professionals can simply check it with you
• You can avoid unnecessary and/or repeated appointments and tests as the people looking after you can see what has already been done
• It is easy to see the other people and organisations who are providing care to you
• It helps people in different organisations to work together to improve your care and experience
• Organisations will be able to provide full audit trails of who has seen your information, which is not always possible with current methods such as sharing via phone or emails.

Connecting your Care shares adult and children’s health information, and adult social care information, which includes:

• Your name, address and NHS number
• Appointments and hospital attendances
• Important social care or clinical history, including diagnoses, medicines and allergies
• Recent results, such as blood tests and x-ray/scan reports.
• Information electronically transferred when a care home resident is taken to hospital in the form of a Care Home Emergency Pack (formerly known as the eRedBag). This includes information relating to both health and social care data and preferences.

This is the same information that is already shared between or requested from health and care professionals when you are referred to them for services or treatment. However, sharing it via Connecting your Care in “real time” at the point at which they are caring for you, is a much more secure way of finding your information especially during and emergency.

Children’s social care records are not currently being shared, and neither is “sensitive” information that is excluded by law, such as records about sexual health, adoption and assisted conception.

Connecting your Care is a “combined electronic view” of information taken from the different record systems at the organisation where you are being treated or cared for. The information is pulled into a single, read-only, summary view that health and care professionals can access within their own record systems. It does not collect or change any of your existing information and can only be looked at when your record is open. It is not saved, cannot be shared anywhere else, and can only be seen by those authorised to see your information.

Only the people directly involved in your care, at the time and place when you see them, or when they are preparing to see you, can lawfully see your information.

The organisation that are part of the Connecting your Care programme are expanding all the time to include wider health and care sharing both in South West London, and also in other areas outside of South West London where care may be provided.

At the moment, these organisation in South West London are:

• Acute trusts
• GP practices
• Community Services
• Mental Health Services
• Social Care Services
• NHS 111 and Out of Hours services
• Some hospices and community pharmacies
• Care homes

You can find a full list of all of the Organisations who are part of Connecting your Care on our website.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic information sharing has also been expanded outside of South West London to include sharing records between acute Trusts and GPs across London, and this may extend also to surrounding areas.

This sharing has proved to be critical in supporting health and care practitioners caring for patients during the Covid-19 pandemic. Patients are commonly now transferred outside of their local area for emergency care (such as patients transferred to the Nightingale Hospital, or patients needing GP or urgent care treatments at emergency hubs outside of their local borough). These information sharing pathways are expected to continue, due to the ongoing need to manage good information sharing for the duration of the pandemic.

Each organisation involved in the Connecting your Care programme must publish a Privacy Notice on their website that states the organisations with whom the information is being shared and must make this available on request.

You can find a full list of all of the Organisations who are part of Connecting your Care on our website.

Yes. Information about you is protected in accordance with current data protection legislation. Health and care professionals may only look at your information whilst directly providing care to you. They must keep the information shared about you secure and confidential.

Connecting your Care cannot be directly accessed over the Internet, only via a secure network from within the health or care organisation. And only the people with authorised access can see the information about you from other organisations.

You cannot access Connecting your Care yourself,  but you can find out what information an organisation holds  and shares about you by making a Subject Access Request (SAR) to any organisation where you have a health or care record.

Please note, the organisation does not share *all* your information to Connecting your Care, just the information it has been agreed is important to support others in providing you with care.

More information about what is specifically shared from each organisation can be found on the South West London Connecting your Care website.

For more information about making a Subject Access Request visit this website https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/your-right-of-access/.

No. Connecting your Care provides information from a much broader range of organisations than the Summary Care Record, which shows just a subset of information from your GP record.

Due to changes in the UK data protection legislation it is not possible to carry opt out requests from other systems moving forward.

If you do not want to share any of your health and care records, you will need to contact the Data Protection Officer at the organisation(s) that holds the record concerned and advise them that you “object” to sharing your information to Connecting your Care. Details of how to contact the Data Protection Officer for each organisation will be in the Privacy Notice on their website. Each organisation you submit an “objection” to will review your request and respond to you directly.

If you have records in more than one organisation you will need to contact each organisation separately.

For more information about Connecting your Care, please visit www.swlondon.nhs.uk/connectingyourcare

or contact us:

By email: connectingyourcare@swlondon.nhs.uk
By telephone: 0203 668 3100