Part of 2. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 2:48 pm on 7 December 2016.
Well, we actually ran a pilot on this before deciding on the roll-out, and I announced the roll-out in March last year. That actually came with an investment of £0.75 million to enable the IT platforms to go up. There are practical things to do to make sure the GP record can be shared. We’ve got sign-off and buy-in from partners, in particular our GP partners, to make sure that the record can be shared, because we want to make sure that the care that is provided within pharmacies is actually shared with the record, so people understand the treatment that is taking place. And I think that is the most transformational part of the scheme that we’re implementing. There should be more that we can do in the safe sharing of that record, with a proper login and with proper audit trails as well. So, I expect that we’ll make real progress over the next year and more. We’ve said that we want at least half of pharmacies to be able to deliver this scheme within the next few years; we actually think that we may be able to go further than that. There are health boards showing real ambition in making sure that community pharmacies are delivering more and more on health, because it is a convenient way to receive healthcare for the individual, but also for the health service a more efficient way of delivering many forms of the different care we’ve talked about.