Frequently Asked Questions

A Local Health and Care Record (LHCR) partnership is a group of NHS and local authority organisations working together using digital technology to share information to help continually improve health and care services. The Thames Valley and Surrey (TVS) Care Records Partnership is one of the national LHCR programmes.

For further information see NHS England's summary of the Local Health and Care Record Exemplar programme and the NHS England announcement regarding Thames Valley and Surrey.

• Share Your Care programme in Berkshire and Frimley
• The Oxfordshire Care Record
• My Care Record in Buckinghamshire
• The Surrey Care Record

• Surrey Heartlands Integrated Care System and East Surrey (ICS)
• Frimley Health and Care ICS
• Buckinghamshire Integrated Care Partnership (ICP)
• Oxfordshire ICP
• Berkshire West ICP
• Milton Keynes University Hospital Trust

• Multiple Integrated Care Systems (ICS') and Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) working together
• Better, safer care by connecting and providing access to an individual's care record across the Thames Valley and Surrey region. 
• Use of data for improving physical and mental health outcomes through planning, research and innovation, with strong links to academic centres, Academic Health Science Networks and Commissioning Support Units.

The main elements of the programme will be set up during 2019 and 2020. The current status of the TVS Care Records in in each of the local areas across TVS will be updated regularly here.

Data can only be processed on the Thames Valley and Surrey shared records platform once the essential Information Governance agreements and communications are in place. These will give data controllers confidence as to how the information legally provided from and to their services will be managed.

The information shared will include key topics such as diagnosed health conditions, medications, allergies and adverse reactions, test results, referrals, clinical letters and discharge information, care plans and contact details. 

This information will only be viewed by authorised professionals directly involved in your care. Role-based Access Control (RAC) restricts the level of access each professional gets based on the job that they undertake relating to your care.

By bringing health and care information together in one place for every authorised professional involved in your care, we can improve the safety, accuracy, speed and quality of care for you and your family.

At the moment your records are kept by individual organisations involved in your care. For example your GP will have a record  and if you attend hospital, they will create a separate record. If you use adult and children’s services in local authorities, they will also create a record. At the moment these are unlikely to be shared meaning they can be inaccurate or incomplete. Bringing these electronic records together in one place will provide a fuller picture about your health.

In some areas there are local records sharing programmes covering a part of the Thames Valley and Surrey region. For example, My Care Record in Buckinghamshire. We know however that a lot of healthcare happens further afield, for example about one in five episodes of hospital care is provided outside of a patient's home county. The work of the partnership will connect local care records across the TVS region.

The information in your local care records can only be seen by care professionals directly involved in providing care to patients and service users. Only those involved in your direct care will access information that identifies you.

This includes authorised health and care professionals across different organisations that will be able to access a shared record when providing your care, including: GP Practices, Community Healthcare Services, NHS Hospitals, Hospices, Mental Health Services and Social Care Services.

Care professionals need access to all relevant data about you to ensure your care is safe and effective. 

However if you have concerns about the sharing of your data and wish to raise an objection then you can do so under the GDPR legal right to object. 

You will need to contact the health and care organisation(s) that hold the information on you and discuss your concerns with them. They will help clarify who can see your data and why. Should you still have concerns they will discuss what possibilities there are to address these. 

1. To provide your care
2. Using data to ensure effective design and operation of health and care services

The Thames Valley & Surrey Care Record holds a set of information about you from the health and care organisations that provide care for you locally. 

The records of those health and care organisations are subject to retention periods set out in documents such as the NHS Records Management Codes of Practice.

As the information about you on the Thames Valley & Surrey Care Record comes from local organisational systems, the data will be kept for the same amount of time that it is kept on those local systems. For examples of the data retention periods that may apply, click here.

The legal basis for processing data within the TVS Care Records is ‘the provision of health or social care services’ GDPR Article 9(2)(h) and GDPR Article 6(1)(e) for a ‘task carried out in the public interest’. 

The Thames Valley & Surrey Care Records Partnership is not a data controller. 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 TVS Care Records when needed to benefit your care. 

 If you have any concerns about data sharing, please speak to the local care organisations who hold your records. As there will be more than one organisation involved in the provision and processing of information about your care across the Partnership, the various system leads will act as Joint Data Controllers in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR 2018).

Yes, the data held in the TVS records sharing programme will be stored securely in a resilient UK cloud-based platform hosted by Microsoft, who provide data hosting for many NHS organisations. The TVS LHCR is subject to stringent cyber-security assessments to ensure there is strong protection to maintain the safety of health and care data.

No, not at the moment. If you are registered at a GP practice outside of the Thames Valley and Surrey region, please check with them directly as your record may be shared as part of another Local Health and Care Record (LHCR) programme. We are working to provide connections with other regions so that information is available for authorised health and care professionals wherever they are providing treatment - for example when you are on holiday or commuting to and from work.

The TVS Care Records programme will use anonymised information for health and care planning and research. This is called ‘secondary use’ of data. Identifiable patient information will only be used for your individual care. Your anonymous information helps us to plan which services to run, and help with diagnosis and treatments.

Anonymised information is data where the details which can identify an individual person have been removed.

This means that when anonymised information from many people is combined together it is not possible to identify any individual. This data can then be used to enable better health and social care planning and forecasting to improve patient outcomes.

The Information Commissioner’s Office gives guidance about what details must be removed or masked, and the safeguards that must be followed to anonymise data effectively.