Shared Care Record Summit 2024 Round-Up

The 2^nd Annual Shared Care Record Summit brought together hundreds of Health and Social Care professionals to showcase national, regional, and local progress in sharing information through a healthcare setting. The event ran over 16 & 17 April and was held at the ICC in Birmingham.

Last year’s event was hosted in Leeds, and this year it was the turn of Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust (BSMHFT) to host together with our Yorkshire and Humber Care Record (YHCR) and Interweave teams. Carl Beet, Director of Digital Services and Chief Information Officer, opened the Shared Care Record Summit and went on to discuss the positive impacts of shared care record adoption.

Throughout the two-day event, guests heard from a range of speakers. Including the opening keynote speakers on day one, Dr James Reed, Chief Clinical Information Officer at BSMHFT. Dr Reed has strongly endorsed using the shared care records with his colleagues to ensure a cohesive approach to supporting every patient’s journey to good mental health and wellbeing. He said, “I think we are now at the point where shared care records are seen as something that is an essential part of healthcare rather than an optional extra – and that’s an important stage to be at.”

Dr Reed was joined by Samantha Goncalves, whose son Shane is a patient and has required medical care since birth. Samantha was able to provide attendees with an insightful patient perspective, showing how online resources can help collate important information about a person, and who poignantly told the room that “when you have a good team around you, it really is unbelievable what you can achieve.”

Hearing directly from patients and their families, as well as clinicians, across the two-day event was particularly insightful, as made clear to everyone in the room exactly why we do what we do, why working in health and social care is meaningful, and why co-production and learning from those who use NHS services is an important and useful way to improve experiences over time.

Lee Rickles, CIO, Programme Director & Deputy SIRO, chaired the close of the summit, where the attendees agreed to focus on the following objective for the next 12 months:

• What can NHS England do with suppliers to help everyone make progress. 
• Preparing business cases ready for improved productivity based on the knowledge we already have as a community.
• Work with the existing SHCR GP Connect requirements to speed up the development and provision of structured data for GP Connect.
• NHS England to resolve the current Information Sharing challenges with a national approach. Linking this into the existing and shred evidence from public engagement.
• Create a professional body special interest group to support an evidence-based development of shared care records.
• To progress the connection of citizen/patient England (UK) together so it can be actionable by health and social care.

Shared Care Records provide a safe and secure way of bringing all separate records from different health and care organisations together digitally in one place. To provide service users with the best care, it is important that health and social care staff have the most up to date information available to them. Shared care records assist staff to make the best decisions by having a more ‘joined-up’ picture of a service user’s information. This is important in providing safe, personalised, and connected care.

We would like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who attended the event, whether it was watching our live stream or coming along in person. It was great to see so many people engaged and enjoying the topics discussed across the two days. Additional thanks go to our event organisers, suppliers, speakers, and sponsors, without whom the summit could not take place each year.

Over the next couple of weeks, you can learn more about the stories and insights shared throughout the event, including slide decks, video recordings, and articles, please visit https://yhcr.org/shared-care-record-summit/ to stay up to date with the latest information.

For anyone who missed the event, please be encouraged to watch the recordings on our YHCR YouTube channel, available here any time: https://www.youtube.com/@YHCareRecord