Suspended Record Continuity

A patient’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) is suspended when the patient is removed from their GP practice list without registering elsewhere. Their record then becomes 'suspended'.

This can happen for many reasons such as: 

• a change to the catchment area of the GP practice 
• a patient leaving the practice but not registering with a new one 
• the patient moves abroad

The Suspended Record Continuity (SRC) service stores and transfers these records digitally. It changes the digital tags attached to the patient’s EHR so that it is recognised as suspended. The EHR remains with the previous practice until the patient registers elsewhere. This ensures that the patient's clinical history remains digital, secure, and ready for rapid transfer, maintaining continuity of care.

Practices are still required to deduct, print and send such records to Primary Care Support England (PCSE) for storage. However, the electronic counterpart of these deducted records remains within the deducting practice system database.

When the patient later registers with a new practice, the record can be easily identified and transferred using GP2GP.  The new practice receives the EHR in the form of a GP2GP message and the patient's record is removed from storage.

The service provides support to GP practice personnel when removing a patient from their practice, so to support the electronic ‘custodian’ tag. It caters for the re-registration of patients beyond the point of suspension – to support continuity of a patient’s EHR post-suspension.

There is no user interface for this service.

This service is activated when a practice deducts a patient’s Electronic Health Record (EHR).

There is no direct user interface for this service.

When a patient is removed from a practice, a National Event Management Service (NEMS) update is triggered. The SRC service automatically intercepts this and updates the patient's record on the Personal Demographics Service (PDS).

Specifically, it removes the GP Organisation Data Service (ODS) code and replaces it with a Managing Organisation Field (MOF) code. This 'tags' the record as suspended but keeps the data physically stored at the patient's previous practice.EHRs

Examples of use include:

• a GP administrator accessing the EHR of a new patient
• a clinician accessing a new patient's EHR to support clinical decision making 

This service is mandated for use by all GP practices in England.

This service is live and in a maintenance phase. There are no planned enhancements at this time. Any future changes will be communicated here

This service is live and has been in active use since July 2022.

The following table shows how to contact us about this service.

The following services are related to SRC.