Increasingly, patient medical data is shared e.g. between GP practices and District Nursing, in order to give clinicians access to the most up to date information when attending patients.
The systems we operate require that any sharing of medical information is consented to by patients beforehand. Patients must consent to sharing of the data held by a health provider with other health providers and must also consent to which of those providers can access their data.
For example, it may be necessary to share data held in GP practices with district nurses but the local podiatry department would not need to see it to undertake their work. In this case patients would allow the practice to share their data with the district nurses, but not the podiatry department. In this way access to patient data is under patients' control and can be shared on a 'need to know' basis.