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Your medical records

The Medico Legal Department at our Trust deals with access to patient’s medical records.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation 2018, you, or an authorised representative, are entitled to access your health record. This can include (but not limited to) solicitors, veterans agency, the department of works and pensions and the police. 

The department also completes Medical Insurance Forms from Healthcare Insurance Companies.

Department Opening hours are 08:30 - 17:00 Monday-Thursday and 08:30 - 16:30 on Fridays (Closed on Bank Holidays)

 

How to access your record:

Please telephone the Medico Legal Department (01284 713456) to request a form or email accesshealthrecords@wsh.nhs.uk giving your name, date of birth and address. 

You can also download an application form via the link here.

You will be required to provide two forms of identification, one will need to be proof of address.

 

Please return the application form to the Medico Legal Department together with your copies of identification to: 

Medico Legal Department

West Suffolk Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

Hardwick Lane

Bury St Edmunds

Suffolk  IP33 2QZ

 

You can send us your application form and identification documents using our secure email service, Zivver. Please click here and follow the instructions. You will be sent a verification email and code to use, which provides access to send us your message and documents securely. 

Fees and receiving your record

Generally, no fees are applicable under GDPR, However, if the request is deemed excessive or is duplicated, there could be a fee applied.

Under article 12 of the General Data Protection Regulations, it states that:

Where requests from a data subject are manifestly unfounded or excessive, in particular because of their repetitive character, the controller may either: 

  1. Charge a reasonable fee taking into account the administrative costs of providing the information or communication or taking the action requested; or refuse to act on the request. 
  2. The Trust has decided that if a request is deemed excessive and is more than 1000 pages long, then we reserve the right to charge for the request. The charges are as follows:
  • £0.10 per page for every page more than the first 1000 pages.
  • £10.00 for duplications of same request to same recipient on a disk.
  • £50.00 for duplications of same request to same recipient on paper.

Upon receipt of request, an initial assessment will be completed and if found to be excessive and potentially over 1000 pages, the Trust will contact you to seek approval to proceed with approximate charges. Once approval has been granted, the request will be acted on and an invoice will be raised and payment will be required before release.

We do ask applicants to be specific about which episodes of treatment they wish to have copies of and to complete the application as fully as possible. 

The process takes approximately 30 days and the information will be provided as per your instructions on the application form. Please note that the disc is not compatible with an Apple Mac Computer.

We are also able to provide information via a secure file sharing system if requested. Please note that radiology imagery will not be in DICOM format if using this system.