What Your Care Connected means to practices

"I've had a positive response from my reception team, where Your Care Connected has greatly reduced the time that was spent on the telephone with patient and medication queries from hospitals. Your Care Connected has been greatly welcomed by my patients, too, who have loved the fact that when they are at a hospital and are asked about their concerns and consultations with their GP, it can be accessed by the hospital at the click of a button."

Benefits to Practices

Frees up your time
Because the local hospitals have access to the patient records, they won't need to phone your practice to request information.

Reduces administrative burden
Fewer phone calls from secondary care organisations, less printing and less time spent stood by the fax machine.

Improves data quality
We work with you to ensure the data shared is good quality, which can help to improve QOF prevalence and CQC outcomes.

Helps to improve the care being delivered to your patients
Gives clinicians the information they need, when they need it most.

Does this add more work?

Whilst we anticipate that Your Care Connected will ultimately reduce some of the administrative burden on practices associated with sending patient information to secondary care organisations, there is some initial setup and implementation work, such as our data quality exercise and signing of the data sharing agreement, for practices to undertake in order to set Your Care Connected up and begin sharing data.

We must also ensure that practices are able to support any patient queries that they receive about the service - even if this just involves pointing patients in the direction of our leaflet or website, so we are offering training sessions and in-practice quick reference guides.

Do practices have to take part?

No. Your Care Connected is not a contractual obligation for practices and so they have a choice over whether or not to participate.

If a practice chooses to opt-out of Your Care Connected completely and on behalf of all of their patients, it is important to note the potential consequences:

Your patients’ records will not be available should they visit one of the local NHS secondary care providers participating in YCC – even in emergency situations

If your practice opts out on behalf of all patients, patients who do wish to have their records available may feel they have no choice other than to move to another practice

If the practice decides to participate at a later date, any cost of mailing out to your registered patients will need to be taken on by the practice and not the programme