Kings Medical Practice News www.kingmedicalpractice.co.uk

The practice handles confidential health information and we have to ensure that it is held securely and shared appropriately. A number of laws, principles and obligations govern how we should handle this information. But they have grown increasingly complicated to understand and this has sometimes made it hard for staff to make clear decisions about when they should and should not share confidential information. I am the practice and also NHS Wakefield CCG Caldicott Guardian. It is one of my jobs to ensure that we handle patient confidential information correctly. I went on an update day yesterday for Caldicott Guardian and came across 'A Guide to Confidentiality in Health and Social Care' produced by the Health and Social Care Information Centre. Click here for the link. The guide has a five rules that are very clear and will help staff be clear about how they should protect information and when they can share it. It is also useful for patients because it simply and cl

|Rant on| Access to general practice is top of the agenda again (guess we should expect it with a general election next year). The Labour party is offering to fund 8,000 more GP's and we have since had a counter offer from the Conservatives with David Cameron offering access to seven day a week GP services by 2020. But, and there is a very large but, training practices across Yorkshire are struggling to fill GP training slots. Last year only 75% of posts were filled in August 2014 and this will inevitably lead to a shortage of trained GPs in three years time when we would have expected them to have finished their training. The governments enthusiasm for GP seven day a week working comes from lessons learnt from the seven day a week pilot practices but locally they have not started operating. They were 12 month pilots so how they can say they have learnt lessons from them completely mystifies me, unless they meant that they had already decided what the lessons were going to be an