The Health Foundation: Four questions for the single patient record (27 May 2026)

Summary

New powers for ministers to establish a ‘single patient record’ (SPR) in England was one of the headline-grabbing measures in the government’s new Health Bill, published earlier this month. The SPR was announced in the government’s 10-Year Health Plan last year. The aim is to bring together people’s NHS and social care data, like test results and letters, in one place to improve care. 

The ambition is good. Virtually every major NHS digital strategy since 2002 has called for patient data to flow more freely across the system – for instance, between GPs and hospitals – to make care faster and safer. The SPR is the latest and most legislatively ambitious attempt to deliver this, acknowledging that voluntary and standards-based approaches have repeatedly fallen short.

But making it happen is easier said than done. The Health Bill set out little detail about how the SPR will look and work in practice. And the experience of a long line of failed NHS IT programmes points to a mix of questions government will need to answer to build trust in the proposals. In this blog, the Health Foundation sets out four questions for SPR:

1. How will the SPR actually work?
2. How can patient and clinician trust be earned? 
3. What will implementation look like?
4. What kind of transformation will the SPR enable?