The following appeared a day or so ago:
Tories promise records for all
02 Nov 2009
Patient-held records are one of the Conservative Party's priorities for health, according to plans published today.
The party said it would carry out a full consultation on how to move to patient-held records with a view to introducing them throughout the NHS.
In a speech at the Royal College of Pathologists, party leader David Cameron said patient-held records would put patients in control and allow resources to be pushed from bureaucrats to professionals and patients.
He added: “When Labour were deciding how to store people’s health record, they commissioned a massive, bureaucratic IT project and spent billions of pounds on a centralised database.
“Our approach is to say that today, in the post-bureaucratic age, you don’t need a massive central computer to do this.”
Cameron said ‘one option’ would be for patients to store their health records online although he did not refer to commercial health platforms such as Google Health and Microsft’s HealthVault which have been widely mooted in connection with his party's health plans.
The proposals published today indicate that the Conservatives want a system wide reform of the NHS, focusing on five priorities: creating a patient-led NHS, measuring health outcomes, putting healthcare professionals in charge of delivering care, focusing government action on improving public health and reforming long-term care.
Priorities include a pledge to ‘restructure’ Choose and Book to enable all referrals to be made to a named consultant - an option that is currently left to individual trust departments to activate - and to widen the number of providers on the system.
The published priorities do not include any further detail on the Conservatives' plans to dismantle the National Programme for IT in the NHS' central infrastructure, as outlined earlier this year.
More here:
http://www.e-health-insider.com/news/5342/tories_promise_records_for_all
Link: David Cameron's speech on the Conservative Party website
I wonder is this plan more sensible than what we had from the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission here?
Time will tell I guess.
I note that a recent survey showed most were not keen on sticking with the NHS PHR (Healthspace)
More news: The survey also revealed strong support for the NHS' personal health record platform, HealthSpace; and a lack of support for companies like Microsoft and Google holding health records.
Link is in the text.
The good thing here is that at least there is substantial political interest in the topic – which is more we can say for OZ as far as I can tell.
David.
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