Helpful facts about legislation governing the retention of Medical records.

What legislation is in place governing access to health records? This applies to GP Surgeries, Dental Practices and NHS Health Organisations. The Data Protection Act passed in 1998 governs access to the health Medical records of living people. It became effective from 1st March 2000, and superseded the Data Protection Act 1984 and the Access to Health Records Act 1990, though the Access to Health Records Act 1990 still governs access to the Medical health records of deceased people. The Data Protection Act 1998 gives every living person the right to apply for access to their personal Medical health records. What is a health record? A health record is defined in the Data Protection Act 1998 as a record consisting of information about the physical or mental health or condition of an identifiable individual made by or on behalf of a health professional in connection with the care that individual. How are health records recorded? Medical health records can be held either in printed form or kept in digital form on computer servers. GP Surgeries and Dental practices have Medical Health records in various formats: hand-written clinical notes, letters to and from other health professionals, laboratory reports, radiographs and other imaging records e.g. X-rays and not just X-ray reports, printouts from medical monitoring equipment, photographs, videos and tape-recordings of telephone conversations. All may be relevant to ongoing cases which need to be kept safe and secure. What about private health records? The Data Protection Act 1998 covers and governs Medical records kept by National Health Service ("the NHS"). It also equally applies to the private health sector and to health professionals’ private practice records. What may come as a surprise to many Commercial organisations is that tt also applies to the records of employers who hold information relating to the physical or mental health of their employees, if the record has been made by or on behalf of a health professional in connection with the care of the employee. Does it matter when the record was created? No. Individuals have a right to apply for access to records irrespective of when they were compiled. Whereas the Access to Health Records Act 1990 did not provide individuals with a statutory right of access to records compiled prior to November 1991, under the Data Protection Act 1998 there is no such limitation.

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