Access to Patient Records

What can I see on the system?

The system allows you to view the following areas of your medical record:

• A summary that gives you the most important and recent entries in your health record.
• Consultations including: date, practitioner seen, reason for visit, history, examination, outcome, investigations, etc.
• Medical Record showing diagnoses, investigations, and procedures
• Allergies.
• Patient Information Leaflets linked from the diagnoses in the medical record section.
• Results showing all investigations such as blood results, liver tests, blood pressure etc.
• Vaccinations.
• Medications.
• Letters to and from the GP.

Advantages to you, the patient:

• No queuing to get results
• You can check the accuracy of your medical record
• You are empowered to become more involved in your own medical care

REMEMBER – To protect your privacy, as with all password protected applications on the internet, logout of the system when you are finished.

Accessing your GP-held records via the NHS app or NHS website

Patient access to electronic health records – the steps taken to protect your privacy

You now have access to the ‘full’ record where you will be able to see everything, including the notes which have been written by doctors, nurses and others involved in your care, at the GP surgery, and elsewhere from November 2023.

It’s important to remember that these documents may, at times, contain information that could be upsetting, especially if they contain news of a serious condition. It can also be a cause for worry seeing results online when it isn’t clear what the results might mean, and no one is available to ask, as can be the case during the evening or at weekends, for example.

Sometimes people with a mental health condition might prefer not to see documents that remind them of difficult times in their life. Letters from mental health teams sometimes go into detail about past events, and great care would be needed in deciding whether you would want to see these letters. It is possible for individual items to be hidden at your request and we would be happy to talk about any concerns you may have.

Great care is also needed in case private details might cause harm at home, should people in a difficult or pressured relationship be forced to show their medical record to an abusive partner. Anyone in such a position should make this clear to us at the practice, so we can take steps to keep you safe. This might mean removing access through the NHS app for the time being, or through a careful process where we hide sensitive things. We would be happy to talk this through with you.

Maintaining Confidentiality

Passwords are very important when accessing personal information over the internet (from your bank, supermarket or General Practice) because systems on the web are built to discriminate very carefully when incorrect passwords are entered. Passwords should generally be case sensitive which means that not only is the correct order of letters, numbers and other characters is required but it is also essential also to use the correct upper and lower case letters.