In normal circumstances an individual's primary point of contact with the NHS is supposed to be their GP, and the GP's surgery will normally hold the main medical records for each person under their care. But then other parts of the NHS, such as hospitals or therapists, may hold their own records in connection with the specialised treatments they provide. There are all kinds of protocols for sharing health records between clinical professionals who are directly responsible for a patient's care and potentially others and successive governments keep meddling with them in ways that make you nervous about those others and what they get to know and what they can do with it.
I kind of assumed there was some public administrative service run by the national government behind it all. That would have been the logical entity to run a central storage repository, and perhaps to administer and maybe even define the storage and transmission format(s). IMO.
> It is unfortunate because obviously in principle a single centrally-administered records facility with robust security and audit trails for all access and a Hippocratic Oath level of privacy protections would be far better than the status quo in many ways.
Funny, one would have thought that pretty much is the status quo already: Looks to me like the UK already has (or should have) a single centrally-administered records facility with robust security and audit trails -- isn't that the NHS?
If it doesn't at the moment quite fulfill your requirements, it certainly ought to anyway, oughtn't it? So the problem is one of fixing its possible current deficiencies, not one of lacking it entirely. Or?