Prospective records access
In common with other suppliers Primary Care IT has decided not to create searches for this purpose. When discussed with our Risk Team there were a number of concerns which led us to take this decision:
If practices were given searches to identify patients, they may just use these and then feel that the required work was done. There is far more work that needs to be undertaken around safe access to records and by creating a defined set of searches we would be concerned that this may be overlooked.
No search can ever identify all patients at risk and so this would be a gross oversimplification of the processes that should happen and would leave both the practice (and potentially PCIT) at risk from not identifying high risk patients. Much of the time concerns around coercive control or domestic abuse are not coded and recorded as free text because of concerns of sending this data elsewhere inadvertently.
We have seen some resources that look useful on the EMIS FB Users group from the PRIMIS Cumbria team - however we would have the same concerns as above, that these shouldn't solely be relied on to inform practice decisions.
I hope this explains our rationale and thinking around this situation. We do have a huge amount of sympathy with practices going through this process as in our own practices we have seen the large volume of work and concern that this has created.