National Care Records Service

The service provides a summary of health and care information for care settings where the full patient record is not required to support their direct care. The service is a web-based application and can be accessed regardless of what IT system an organisation is using and is the improved successor to the Summary Care Record application (SCRa).

Whilst the look and display of information on screen may feel different to that of SCRa, users should be aware that all existing information that was available in the legacy SCRa product remains available in NCRS. NCRS offers additional services that were not available in SCRa. See the roadmap for details.

The NCRS provides access to over 63 million patient records.

National Care Records Service - Video: More Information

Benefits

Benefits of NCRS include:

• NCRS is the new and improved successor to the Summary Care Record application (SCRa). It provides access to patient information for a wider range of health and care professionals
• provides a quick, secure way to access national patient information to improve clinical decision making and healthcare outcomes, and is free to use
• offers multiple access options, for example, biometric authentication and smartcards. It's available in clinical, office or mobile environments over the internet as well as the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) with minimal additional installation
• provides access to an ever-increasing number of NHS Digital Services, including Summary Care Record (SCR), National Record Locator (NRL), Child Protection Information Sharing (CP-IS) and more

Who the service is for

NCRS enables any authorised clinician, care worker and/or administrator, in any health or care setting, to access a patient’s information to support that patient’s direct care.

Helpful information about switching over from SCRa to NCRS is provided in the National Care Records Service (NCRS) user guidance.

As a user, if feel that something is missing from NCRS, please contact liveservices.operations@nhs.net to tell us about it.

What we deliver

NCRS provides access to an ever-increasing number of centrally provisioned national digital services that support the direct care of patients.

The following services relate to NCRS:

• Personal Demographics Service (PDS) - including the ability to edit patient demographic information
• Birth Notification process
• Summary Care Records (SCR) - core and Additional Information 
• National Record Locator Service (NRL) – pointers to and retrieval of data held in local provider systems 
• Child Protection - Information Sharing service (CP-IS)
• Reasonable Adjustment(s)
• Female Genital Mutilation - Information Sharing (FGM IS) 
• Overseas Visitors and Migrants (OVM)
• Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccination event information

It includes access to more than 57.5 million Summary Care Records with patient additional information. It also enables users to view over 450,000 care plan records via the National Record Locator. 

You can look up NHS patient numbers through the Personal Demographics Service, reasonable adjustment(s) (where flagged) and the Child Protection - Information Sharing service. Improved access to patient information supports the provision of safer care.

National usage policy

NCRS enables any authorised clinician, care worker and/or administrator, in any health or care setting, to access a patient’s information to support that patient’s direct care.

Examples of use

NCRS should be used:

• where access to a summary of key patient information is required to support clinical decision making where full detailed patient records are not required 
• to compliment local shared records by giving access to key patient information across ICS boundaries 
• where a local shared care record is not available currently 

The strategic intention for NCRS was set out in the Department for Health and Social Care policy Plan for digital health and care.

It is part of the work to build core national ‘connect’ capabilities, to enable authorised health and care professionals to have a holistic experience of the health and care system, no matter where they happen to be in England.