The NHS Care Record Service has a number of components: 1. PDS (the Personal Demographics Service) stores names, ages, addresses and registered GP of all NHS patients. This data has been held by the NHS for many years in central computer systems and there is no option to opt-out of this service. 2. PSIS (the Personal Spine Information Service) will store details of patients’ clinical records and medication. This data has only previously been held on local GP and hospital systems, not centrally. It is allowable for patients to opt
out of this service, but they need to understand that this information will then not be available to other healthcare professionals when they are seen, for instance, in an Accident and Emergency department. If they refuse consent for their records to be shared, then a blank record will be created on PSIS to demonstrate that they have opted out. 3. EPS (the Electronic Prescription Service) receives details of prescriptions from GPs for pharmacists to draw down and dispense medication items. It is not currently possible to withhold consent for this data to be shared, but it is only shared with the pharmacist who will dispense the medication and the Prescription Pricing Division of the NHS Business Services Authority. If patients do not want their prescriptions transmitted electronically, then GPs can continue to print them on paper. Vision supports patients refusing consent for their records to be shared on PSIS.
There is an explicit flag that can be set, that will be transmitted to PDS to mark their records as refused consent to share the clinical record. In addition we are aware that GPs have been receiving advice to record a read code (93C3.00 “Refused consent for upload to national shared electronic record”) in patients’ records. If either condition is true before the Initial Upload, then Vision will transmit a blank National Summary record to PSIS. (Updated 26/05/2007) - Important Note: There is a fault in the searches and reports module with regards to searching the Diabetic Retinopathy Screening entity. If you search the actual entity everything will be fine. However if you use All other clinical data entity, it will not be picked up. Important Note: The new facility to bulk replace therapy after a drug update, within the Drug Dictionary module is only available for that particular drug update. This means that you only have 1 month in which to replace the drugs, before the new drug update overwrites the existing file, as drugs updates seem to been happening monthly lately. | 
