The Government has adopted a system of Clinical Governance to ensure that national standards in health services are met, and covers all aspects of health services to ensure patients receive the highest possible quality of care. For example, it deals with the doctors’ and nurses’ consulting skills and the level and appropriateness of information they use for themselves and for sharing with patients.

Health informatics is a term used to encompass the knowledge, skills and tools, which enable information to be collected, managed, used and shared to support the delivery of healthcare.

Clinical Governance is directly linked to health informatics because, these days, all health care information is held on the computer in some form or other. Indeed, Information Governance and Clinical Governance overlap so much that the terminology is often interchanged.

Your medical record is very important as it is integral to your health care. Obviously it is essential that records are kept as accurately as possible and are up-to-date. Your medical record is now held entirely on computer. Apart from being a chronological record of your health care, to which the doctors and nurses need to refer, the computerized records allow us to perform other essential tasks with relative ease. For example we can use the information to make sure we offer appointments for health reviews at the appropriate time, and for clinical audit, which proves to be a useful tool for continually reviewing and improving the services we provide.

As a patient, it is a great help if you keep us up-to-date with your personal information, eg your contact details or even aspects of your health such as if you stop smoking. The more accurate a health record is, the better health care can be provided. This is a start of how we perceive the future health record should be; a record as much the patient’s as the doctor’s. We are currently developing the means for patients to access their records via this website and, in some circumstances, to update their record. If you would like to learn more about this please email Kathryn Hargreaves .

We are committed to maintaining a higher than average level of expertise in the management of information in the practice and we are proud to have won awards , which reflect our efforts over the years.