Medical Records

Wow, that's expensive. I thought you had the right to have a copy, I walked into our doctors and got a 3-4 page printout for the wife in 5 minutes, no charge. Must be the same in Scotland surely?
As to whether its worth it depends on your conditions I suppose.
We'll have a suitcase for meds 
Ray

I think the surgeries have the right to charge. Can also take 21 days apparently! Ridiculous that they can't just print it out then and there. I'd even take them some paper 😁

Interested to know if anyone has gone through the process and found having records has helped, or not made much difference.

Fees are set by law, max £10 for all-electronic records, max £50 for records held partially or totally offline.

Free to see the information, only charged to take a copy away

Then I suppose our practice must have them partially offline. Typical!

Wow, that's outrageous! Our GP supplied ours gratis. In fact it was he who suggested we take a copy with us

They are now saying that they can provide a letter that gives a summary of conditions, current treatment and medication for either free or a 'small fee', will find out how much later on. So we may try this first and only ask for full records if we are having problems.

Even to get that, we have to go in and make a written request, and they want a third party witness to sign the request. For our own info! We don't have anyone available so I've said I will literally be asking a stranger in the waiting room! Ridiculous

This is the NHS guidance on medical records and it sounds like your GP is just maxing out what they can get from you.

Data protection

http://www.nhs.uk/chq/pages/1309.aspx?categoryid=68

Fees

http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/2635.aspx?C … goryID=160

To be honest, we didn't get a full copy of our records (probably reams of useless info) rather a summary. Summary is quite concise though, detailing hospital visits/ops/accidents/ and summary of Medication history

Update: they've agreed to give us the two summaries for £10 in total, because apparently they are 'quite short'. I'm surprised at that, as I have quite an extensive medical history! Hopefully they will be sufficient to set up ongoing care and medication.

It's a shame you haven't set up online access as this would give you the summary of medication etc and also full medical history. I just checked mine and went back as far as 2008, many pages though but I can copy it.
It did only take 24 hours to set it up with our surgery a couple of years ago.
Ray

I am set up on our surgery's online system but it is appointment booking and repeat med orders only. I didn't think a print out of meds from there would look official enough.

Sounds like your surgery has a much better system than ours Ray.