Accessing & Viewing the Summary Care Record

Adding a Summary Care Record to an OPERA clinical activity

Before accessing, requesting or viewing the SCR please ensure that you are familiar with the NHS guidance on the use of SCRs. NHS Digital has provided details here: https://digital.nhs.uk/services/summary-care-records-scr

Access to Summary Care Records is closely monitored - you must not view a SCR unless you have the Patients's Permission to View (PTV). Please ask your PES clinical lead for more information.This article provides information on how to access and view the SCR.

In order to add an SCR to a patient episode you need to look for this element in the patient episode form:

It is important that this is explicit consent to the SCR access - and should not be confused with the regular consent process for PES activity.

Viewing SCRs

You can usually view an SCR:

During the telemedicine and other CUES sessions if the patient consented to SCR and there was an SCR available (not all patients have these)
Via the document view icon. However, you should only view if necessary for clinical care.
In some advice and guidance sessions.

Please note that you should only view an SCR if you are involved in direct care of the patient and have a legitimate relationship to the patient. Each access of the SCR is audited against your GOC number and access patterns and viewing recorded and assessed by our Privacy Officer. The SCR is a highly confidential and sensitive document. You should not print, download or share this document with anyone else or use information contained within it for anything other than clinical care.

While you are in a CUES clinical reporting session you can view the SCR while you are completing your report by selecting the SCR button on the top of the screen. This will only be visible if an SCR has been retrieved:

Please note the date and time of the SCR to ensure that the information are up to date. Use the page buttons to scroll through the SCR at the bottom of the page.

To view an SCR outside of clinical reporting, go to the referral management page and look for the blue documents icon.

Click on this icon and you will be taken to the document screen where you can see all the documents related to your referral and if an SCR is available you can access it there.

The SCR is a highly confidential and sensitive document. You should not print, download or share this document with anyone else or use information contained within it for anything other than clinical care.

SCR Validity

Please note that SCR should only be used in urgent care as they can quickly become out of date. Please always read the front page of the SCR which will clearly indicate the time the SCR was produced. OPERA routinely removes SCR documents from completed episodes so you may find that previously retrieved SCR document has been deleted.

Example SCR

If you would like to see an example SCR for training purposes - a dummy version is available here.

Example-SCR-OPERA.pdf

Last reviewed: 05/01/2023