Erasing Medical History ?

[think about it]

If you wanted to erase your medical history - or certain parts - is there any way to do it without moving from the UK altogether ?

 

 

In short, you can't erase/amend it. Even when we have patients moving overseas we quite often get approached by their new medical centre to provide at least a summary.

 

Even when patients do move overseas their actual paper records are returned to patient record stores to await their potential return. Only ten years after death are they destroyed.

[think about it]

I think one of the issues is that unless a definitive diagnosis is possible through quantatative testing like actual images, blood/urine etc then a diagnosis is clinical. There's an expectation that even in the absence of such definitive results that the clinician will draw on his/her experience and training and will give an impression of what they feel is happening. You might agree with it, you might not but even then it forms part of your records. Whether that be misdiagnosis or lies as you say it's still a valid record of your treatment and could help to inform your current clinicians decision making.

[think about it]

Interesting that this thread should be resurrected after I read this a few days ago: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/aug/01/patient-legal-battle-medical-records

 

It got me thinking about my own records and how in reality, there's lots of distressing things on there from cancer scares to the loss of a child and two brothers, major surgery and a catalogue of medication used to make my conditions manageable. None of it is particularly happy or easy to think about but the truth is that it forms part of a record of my mental and physical wellbeing which may one day be of use to someone treating me. I'm caused significant distress by the copy of my little girl's autopsy report that's on there, but it's relevant if my son ever has any concerns over his health and genetics, the images of a significant injury don't make for easy viewing either but if in the future I need further surgery then I'd like to think that the surgeon knows what they're getting themselves into, I'm sure my mental health records following multiple losses in my close family aren't exactly the image of stability but again, should I need more help it'd be great if they knew where the issues lay. Working in General Practice means I see thousands of people's records, none of them - besides the good news stuff like successful ivf etc make for easy reading but should that mean we delete the difficult bits? I don't think so.

[think about it]

Knowing how much security exists around the IT side of things, I'm perfectly happy where they are - and there are worse things to lose than a bunch of relatively meaningless to anyone else notes. We already get profiled with our Tesco points cards / bank cards etc so it's unlikely that my medical notes would add anything of value. It's far more advantageous to go after my 'identity' than it is my history. Besides, I already get hassled by just about every charity / company selling something at the moment, so an increase in background noise is more of an inconvenience to my spam filter than it would be to me.

 

I see every day how the notes are used, and I wouldn't have a clinician without them.

 

I'm not sure who'd want to buy them either, so Mr. TAI, dead kid insurance? Err, no thanks... What about a nice comfy chair for your bad back? Nope... Got one of them already. Okay, how about some feeling a bit low insurance? Nah, really, you're fine.

 

Life insurance companies frequently, with patient's permission, require / obtain copies of full medical records as part of the underwriting process anyway and as its often done in the form of a subject access request often represent a significant burden on the practice in doing so. The maximum of £50 in no way covers two days of secretarial time standing at a photocopier copying reams of notes for us then to have to send them via special delivery to get tracking information. It's a massive cost to the practice in terms of time, consumables and postage every time - it'd be easier in some respects if they did have them. Especially for the NHS.