The vaccination event information being collected at vaccination sites is important to clinicians who are making decisions in many different NHS settings.
If someone is registered with a GP, then information about their vaccination will flow back to the GP record. The vaccination event information will then also be sent to the SCRa.
This ensures that the information is available if that person has medical treatment elsewhere and the clinician treating them needs to check this information as part of their treatment.
However, there are approximately 1.5 to 3 million people in the UK who are not registered with a GP. Therefore, for people who are not registered with a GP, the SCR would not be updated in the usual way to show that that person has received a vaccination. This is because the SCR usually relies on updates that come from a person’s GP record. This would mean that clinicians would not be able to tell from the SCR whether a non-registered person they were treating had received the vaccine.
The SCRa provides the broadest possible way to present vaccination event information. It's available across a wide range of care settings, providing scheduled and unplanned care, so it's very important when providing care to patients.
For this reason, where patients are not registered with a GP and receive a vaccination, we will update the SCRa directly with the information relating to that person’s vaccination.
The SCRa will provide clinicians with an additional way of determining a patient’s coronavirus vaccination history. This may be particularly important when planning ongoing care or responding to symptoms or changes to a patient’s health, which may be linked to coronavirus, such as an allergic reaction to a vaccine.
Using SCRa, clinicians will also be able to see that a patient has had a previous adverse reaction at the point of vaccination and take appropriate action with the direct and/or ongoing care they provide.
This will also support clinicians providing direct care to patients, who might not have a GP medical record or a Summary Care Record with Additional Information.