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4+ months to transfer medical records

Posted By peterhw

"4+ months to transfer medical records"

About: General practices in Ayrshire & Arran

(as a service user),

My wife and I moved to Scotland in October 2017 from South of the border. In November 2017 we registered with a local GP who requested medical records be transferred. After many, many emails, phone calls to NHS (& other possibly helpful organisations ) etc the records for my wife were transferred after 4+ months and around 6 months for my own records. As far as I understand a certain private company (based in England) was responsible for the (mis) management of the records and a letter from our local MP directly to this company's CEO appeared to make the difference. The organisation was awarded a contract (by the UK government I assume) to process / handle medical records within the NHS.  The records eventually transferred were paper copies from digital.

As far as I am aware there is no known fault of our original GP in England who transferred the record as soon as requested.  Equally no fault of the new GP in Scotland and local NHS (in Scotland) who had been chasing this and many other similar requests.

I feel this just makes a mockery of medical targets when medical staff need access to GP & Hospital records.

An entire process wasting time and valuable resources and jeopardising patient well being!

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Responses

Response from Eunice Goodwin, Patient Feedback Manager for NHS Ayrshire and Arran, Quality Improvement and Governance Team, NHS Ayrshire and Arran 5 years ago
Eunice Goodwin
Patient Feedback Manager for NHS Ayrshire and Arran, Quality Improvement and Governance Team,
NHS Ayrshire and Arran

I respond initially to most of the posts and ensure they are passed to the appropriate team whether they are compliments, observations or grumbles. It is important to make sure all issues are addressed and I try to encourage that to happen for all the posts as required.

Submitted on 04/10/2018 at 11:52
Published on Care Opinion at 11:59

picture of Eunice Goodwin

Dear peterhw,

How disappointing and very angering. This really raises the issues of patient safety and must impact on patient care in at least the lack of continuity of care and at some point is extremely likely to cause harm.

When I read your post I wondered what the 'norm' is so I contacted our Practitioner Services for some background and facts.. As you rightly point out, records from 'South of the border' are handled by a private company. This company has been reported in the BMJ and the national news for problems regarding patient records such as you have reported in this post. In the past, records were generally all received in Scotland within 3 - 4 weeks, however, since the company you refer to was awarded the contract, this is sadly an uncommon time scale

At all levels of the Practitioner Services, everything is being done to rectify this, however, we are definitely not there yet. It is causing immense, additional work with a constant stream of emails to the one email address. It seems that there is only one point of contact for all of England and from your post, and the additional information I got today, it is not working adequately, it is missing by a long way. Some records are taking up to 2 years and this is totally unacceptable. This is people's health that is involved and not something we can accept. We need to return to the gold standard of records being received in less than 4 weeks.

Should others need to contact this email address to chase up their records, the email address is - pcse.complaints@nhs.net

I can’t thank you enough for putting this on Care Opinion and I hope this post will raise awareness and assist in some way to make the improvements needed to ensure patient safety and continuity of care by exerting additional pressure on the company to vastly improved timescales for records transfer.

I am sorry you had such a difficult time getting this resolved but I am glad you have succeeded. Now it is time to get the problems for the system sorted.

Best wishes,

Eunice

  • {{helpful}} {{helpful == 1 ? "person thinks" : "people think"}} this response is helpful

Update posted by peterhw (a service user)

Many, many thanks for your detailed response.

If the problem has not been resolved then I am surprised you have not seen other similar complaints!

The real problem, I suspect, is the UK Government having awarded a somewhat 'open-ended' contract for the management of records which fails to meet any realistic time based target levels. It also seems crazy that England & Scotland do not appear to have some capability to interchange electronic documents. One would have thought and management of records would, almost by definition, include the scanning of all paper documents

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