How long do gps keep medical records

Electronic patient records must not be destroyed or deleted for the foreseeable future. All kinds of records for children and young people should be kept until the patient is 25 or 26 if they are 17 when treatment ends or eight years after their death, if sooner. With medical records having such a long storage life span, keeping them in good order — so that they are kept safe and secure and easy to access — can often be a challenge. No one will have access to them.

If your new GP practice can't accept these onto their computer system, or if you are moving to another part of the United Kingdom, we then print your records to paper to allow them to be used by your new GP practice. When the records are printed out they come with a front cover and end page. We use this to tell that the records are complete and do not access the contents. All our staff involved in the transfer of health records are subject to the strict legal regulations covering the disclosure and confidentiality of patient information.

Practitioner Services aims to transfer paper records between GP practices within six weeks of registration. In most cases the transfer time within Scotland is much less than this. If your GP practice requires your previous records as a clinical priority, they can make an urgent request for them. These requests are treated as a priority and in most cases the records are transferred within two days.

If your records are electronic, and they can be accepted onto your new GP practice computer system, they'll normally be transferred within two days of your old practice agreeing to release them. Practitioner Services uses the Community Health Index to keep track of those records that have been received and those that are still outstanding.

If your records have not been received within six weeks we will issue additional requests to your old GP practice. Practitioner Services will not routinely trace health records from, or forward records to, health care providers in countries outwith the United Kingdom. If you are returning to the United Kingdom, or your last registration with a GP practice was cancelled your records may be held in storage.

If we have been advised that you have been in HM Forces, your civilian records will have been kept in storage during your period of service. If you came under the care of a Service Medical Officer, your record would have been transferred on posting.

Practitioner Services uses the NHS Scotland national patient database to keep a note of the GP practice that a patient is registered at.

Other non-clinical information is also stored, eg patient name, date of birth, address and GP details. This latest data grab is symptomatic of the lack of representation, transparency, and accountability within both Whitehall and NHS England. We desperately need a public conversation about the influence corporations are exerting on ministers and political processes, and what this means for democracy.

For now though, if you are registered with a GP in England, you have less than three weeks remaining to opt out of GP data sharing for purposes beyond your direct care should you decide to do so, you can opt back in at any time. At minimum, the government should extend its notice period from four weeks to six months so GPs can inform our patients and provide them with relevant guidance.

Our GP records are an extension of who we are. To treat them with the care and respect that they warrant is to treat us with care and respect. No notes, no defence is a well-known maxim among medical indemnity insurers. However, the question of how long to keep patient records can be vexing for doctors, especially those approaching retirement age, says Don Munro, a partner at HWL Ebsworth lawyers. But he acknowledges that this is not always practical because of storage constraints and costs.