The principle that doctors should have access to anyone’s health records — be that person a regular patient or seen in Accident and Emergency late at night — is an important one.

But current attempts to hold health records on a vast central database, the Connecting for Health project, is a mess and way behind schedule. They should and could have sorted out at least the “summary care record” long ago, and the reason for the delay is very straightforward.

At the moment, Connecting for Health is trying to be far too complicated, as IT and health staff struggle to produce the “detailed care record” on a central database.

This will give doctors more information than is needed in an emergency, where the current dangerous gap exists — and delays the vital “summary care record” from filling this gap.

In Canada, where a similar central database is already up and running, doctors get just one screen telling them the vital information about any patient who turns up in the emergency unit, essential if the patient is unconscious and alone.

As long as this summary care record contains basic information about demographics, medical history, current drug treatment and allergies, I am not bothered about every last detail, since this is rarely needed in an emergency lifesaving situation.

Connecting for Health tries to design a system from scratch, rather than relying on the IT services already operating in different Primary Care Trusts and hospitals and adapting them to communicate with each other.

An alternative may be worth investigating.

I have no objection in principle to allowing companies such as Google or Microsoft to store medical records but the system would have to be secure and accessible only to the patient and relevant clinical staff at the time of need. People must be able to trust it. Could this be a quicker way of getting the vital ‘summary care record’ available soon?

Clearly the patient is going to get much more access to information in future, down to how individual clinical staff, departments and even hospital wards perform.

This will be excellent, as complaints usually relate to identified staff or single wards. Awareness of the detail of complaints and from where or whom they arise is crucial for the concerns to be tackled and raised at trust board level.

Surely this information could be added to the existing NHS Choices database cheaply and quickly rather than going out to tender: I feel it could be confusing to have competing websites offering the same information in different formats. Choice is a vital part of the NHS and all information to guide choice should be available on the well-known NHS website.

Dr Richard Taylor is Independent MP for Wyre Forest and a retired consultant physician

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