Patients can view their care plans created by professionals via the NHS App, under the ‘Your Health’ tab.

Patients can also speak to a professional to receive a printed copy of their care plan.

Yes, if your EPR system is integrated with the Universal Care Plan, patients with a care plan are flagged. This includes users of EMIS, TPP SystmOne, Cleric ePCR, Adastra (via the Special Patient Notes section) and the London Care Record (Cerner Health Information Exchange).

The Universal Care Plan provides a Business Intelligence dashboard. Anyone can sign up to access the dashboard on the Data and Support Resources page.

The Universal Care Plan Programme team are working with Business Intelligence (BI) teams to integrate data from the Universal Care Plan system into local and regional dashboards.

The Universal Care Plan enables information about a person’s urgent care needs and wishes to be communicated with health and social care services. The information recorded in the UCP is shared to enable health and care professionals to care for individuals.

The processing of personal data in the delivery of direct care and for providers’ administrative purposes in your organisation and in support of direct care elsewhere is supported under Article 6 and 9 conditions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Article 6(1)(e) ‘…necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority…’.

Article 9(2)(h) ‘necessary for the purposes of preventative or occupational medicine for the assessment of the working capacity of the employee, medical diagnosis, the provision of health or social care or treatment or the management of health or social care systems and services…”

Under GDPR regulations, this information must only be shared and accessed on a strictly need to know basis by health and care staff.

Staff must make or share information in accordance to the GDPR regulations. Staff are individually accountable for the sharing of information in accordance with relevant organisational policy and GDPR regulations.

Clinical Responsibility

There is no field to mandate the recording of consent for sharing of information via the Universal Care Plan.

Care planning embraces the care of people with and without capacity to make their own decisions. It involves a process of assessment and person-centred dialogue to establish the person’s needs, preferences, and goals of care, and making decisions about how to meet these in the context of available resource. 

The UCP strongly advocates the involvement, by professionals, of people they care for. It remains best practice that there should be no surprises to people.

Staff are individually accountable for the accuracy of information that they record in the care plan, and for ensuring that information is recorded within their professional scope of practice.

If the resident still receives care in London, then they can continue to have a UCP to support them.

• • The UCP will only be editable by London based professionals involved in their care.
  • The UCP will only be accessible outside of London, by services that have access to the National Record Locator (NRL).
  • Their out of London GP will not be able to access or update their UCP and they will not be able to access it from their NHS app.

  If they do not want to keep their UCP, it can be withdrawn by a London based professional involved in their care, under the actions menu, in care plan settings.

  We recommend printing a copy of the UCP and giving it to the resident, before it is withdrawn.

  If the resident wishes to re-instate the UCP in future, this can be done by a London based professional involved in their care