GPs and hospitals will be required to share patient data under legislation to be announced in the king’s speech on Wednesday.

Legislation to create a single patient record (SPR) for each person, which would be used across all healthcare providers, is part of a £10bn digitisation of the health service.

The health secretary, Wes Streeting, said making the data accessible in one place would be a “gamechanger” that would save lives.

The legislation aims to spare patients from constantly having to repeat their medical history when turning up at hospital or being discharged back to their GP.

“As patients, there’s nothing more frustrating than having to repeat your medical history at every appointment,” Streeting said. “When paramedics arrive to heart attack and stroke patients, they can’t see the patients’ medical records, putting them in even greater danger.

“For the first time ever, the single patient record will mean patients are given real control over their care through a single, secure and authoritative account of their data.

“It will be a gamechanger that means NHS staff can see patients’ medical records, allowing them to deliver better care faster and more conveniently, and even saving lives.”

Although some emergency information is already available – such as current medicines and known allergies – hospitals often cannot access the full medical history of a patient. GPs have to wait for letters, sent by email, from consultants to be informed of what happened to their patient in the hospital.

The SPRs will be available to clinicians in parts of the NHS as early as next year, including maternity and frailty care, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) confirmed. The legislation will be part of a health bill that will scrap NHS England by 2027.

The DHSC said patients would receive safer, quicker and more accurate healthcare as the SPRs join up fragmented health information from around the country. They would also have more control and transparency, with clear safeguards, audit trails and choice over how their data is used, while for clinicians it means no more working with missing information or having to check in multiple places to find the same data.

The department added that upcoming legislation would enable information related to a patient’s health and care to be processed for the purposes of establishing and operating the single patient records, but would be robust to the threat of data breaches, and that public and healthcare professionals would be consulted throughout its design.

Dr Alec Price-Forbes, the national chief clinical information officer at NHS England, said it would “revolutionise patient care across the country”.

GPs are currently the data controllers for their patients’ records and can share them with third parties for research purposes, while individual hospitals handle their own data. The legislation will shift responsibility and ownership of the data and force the sharing of information.

GP leaders are said to be concerned about liability for data errors introduced by other providers, and warned that, without statutory clarity and indemnity, data sharing could be slowed rather than accelerated.

The British Medical Association has previously called for doctors to remain in control of GP data in the single patient record data, rather than the DHSC. Its GP committee has warned any move to take control of data away from GPs would damage trust and risk confidentiality.

The NHS Alliance, which represents hospitals and NHS leaders, said in a statement: “A single patient record could make the NHS work better and help different services join up more smoothly. It also has the potential to give patients more control over their own care.

“Our members want the bill to spell out clearly who is responsible for patient data, both when it’s used to deliver care and when it’s used for other purposes, such as research. That means being explicit about who controls which data, who is legally responsible if things go wrong, what data can be used for, and what patients should be told.

“Without that clarity, there is a real risk the bill will struggle to get through parliament smoothly and that public trust in the single patient record will be undermined.”

On the afternoon of 25 September 1944, William Harrison, a US soldier stationed in Northern Ireland, visited the cottage of the Wylie family in Killycolpy, County Tyrone, and offered to buy treats for the children.

He had visited before and was, if not a friend, at least known to the family. Mary Wylie let him take her seven-year-old daughter, Patricia, better known as Patsy, across the fields to the shops.

Even for an era accustomed to war, what happened next was sickening. Harrison raped, beat and strangled Patsy. He left her body behind a haystack and went to the pub. He later confessed and was tried, convicted and executed.

The crime entered Northern Ireland folk memory and US military records as a footnote to the second world war, a case that was harrowing but, at least, closed.

More than eight decades later however, new research has shed fresh light on the story – and revealed that it did not end when the hangman pulled the lever. Annie Kalotschke, Patsy’s niece, gathered testimonies, mined family lore and combed archives, including the 660-page trial transcript, to piece together a tragedy that still echoes on both sides of the Atlantic.

“I’ve been investigating this case, on and off, for 31 years,” Kalotschke said this week from her home in New York. “I decided early on that this horrible story needed to be written down so that the truth can be known to all. The worse part for our family, the leading cause of generational trauma, has been the myths that still exist today.”

The result is a yet-to-be published book, titled Never Speak of Rope, and a new understanding of the murder and its consequences.

An abusive and dysfunctional family in Ohio – Harrison’s mother was a drinker and he fought with his foul-tempered father – produced a “sad sack little guy” with alcohol dependency.

After enlisting in the US army, he was disciplined for drunkenness and treated for amnesia, but instead of being discharged was posted to a reserve combat unit at Cluntoe airfield in Ardboe, County Tyrone, one of the more than 2 million US personnel based in the UK during the war.

In the summer of 1944 Patrick Wylie, a farmer, met the 22-year-old soldier in a pub. Noting his loneliness, he invited him to the family home for a cup of tea. Harrison stayed two days, an unauthorised absence from base that earned three months detention.

On 25 September 1944, Harrison drank heavily before going to the Wylie home and leaving with Patsy, ostensibly to buy minerals and sweets. The pair met Patsy’s nine-year-old sister, Sadie, who was running an errand and declined an invitation to join them.

Harrison later said he killed Patsy because she threatened to tell her mother about the sexual assault, making him “white hot mad”.

The atrocity was extremely rare – one of four murder rapes in the UK attributed to US personnel, said Alan Freeburn, a Northern Ireland historian. “Private William Harrison was the only American who was convicted of child murder and one of three hanged for child rape in the European Theatre of Operations in the second world war.”

Kalotschke discovered that Harrison’s parents petitioned the White House in vain to save their son – and that the executioner, Thomas Pierrepoint, botched the job. Instead of a snapped spinal cord and swift death, those present at Shepton Mallet prison in Somerset on 7 April 1945 watched the rope strangle Harrison for 20 minutes. Pierrepoint was close to retirement and perhaps infirm but Kalotschke suspects vengeance. “Was it because he knew what Harrison was guilty of?”

In Northern Ireland, rumours spread that the murderer had been spared and sent to fight in France, or that he had been spotted on a ship bound for the US, said Kalotschke.

Some locals blamed the Wylies for what had happened. “There was such a stigma about the crime. Men on a bus said to my grandmother: ‘It’s a shame about that wee girl, but that’s what you get when you’re a Yankee lover.’ Utterly devastating.”

Depression consumed Mary until her murdered daughter appeared in a dream and urged her to carry on for the sake of the other four children.

However Sadie, afflicted by survivor’s guilt, could not bear to pass the field where her sister died. She emigrated to New York and seldom spoke of the crime but the trauma affected her and her own children, including Kalotschke, who links that “shadow” to her decision to become a mental health therapist.

Last month, Kalotschke gave a talk at Shepton Mallet and, with relatives, entered the execution chamber. They felt triumphant, she said. “I help my clients to find closure amidst trauma. Well, I can tell you we feel closure. We gave Patsy justice and her voice back. She’s not just a name on a tombstone any more.”