The Health and Social Care Act 2012 gave NHS England the power to direct general practices to allow the new Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) to collect information about all our patients from our clinical records system. This is a legal requirement.

It is planned that the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES) will be used to extract GP data each month. The identifiers to be extracted are: NHS number, date of birth, postcode, and gender which will allow patients’ GP data to be linked to their hospital data. No free text will be extracted, only coded information about referrals, NHS prescriptions and other clinical data. (The technical specification of the extract can be found on the NHS England website.

For more information please visit NHS England’s information page.

If you wish to opt out as outlined in the patient information leaflet then please let us know.

A joint statement on Care Data has been released by the responsible organisations.