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Showing posts with label medical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medical. Show all posts

Monday 17 October 2011

Medical Records

Recently my wife and I made requests at our local surgery for copies of our childhood medical records. They were very helpful and managed to produce mine and photocopy them for me. However my wife's records before the age of 20 were missing. There is usually a small charge for copying these but as there were only a few pages of records, plus letters relating breaking my leg as a youngster, they did not charge me.

Recent experience of hospitals - my daughter-in-law in Kent and my wife in Addenbrookes in Cambridge 2 weeks ago - confirm that, although medical care is generally excellent, the handling of medical records data is appalling: how many times do you have to give the same information to different people? Surely in this day and age it is possible to manage a simple database of information on a patient and have this available over a secure wi-fi network in hospitals? OK, grand national database schemes may be too complicated (although I don't see why) but on a local level surely there is no excuse. Not being asked the same questions by a dozen different people when in hospital would surely make the patient experience a better one, and save the NHS both time and money.

At least I now have a copy of my early medical records in PDF format.