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Access to your medical records

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

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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.

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.

Download the application form

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 your application form and identification documents using our secure email service, Zivver. Send your documents securely via Zivver and follow the on-screen instructions.

You will receive a verification email with a code. Use this code to access Zivver and send your message and documents safely.

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.

If someone makes a request that is clearly unreasonable or too large — for example, if they keep asking for the same thing — we may:

  • Charge a small fee to cover the cost of providing the information, or
  • Say no to the request.

We will treat any request of more than 1,000 pages as too large. If this happens, we may charge:

  • 10p per page for each page over the first 1,000 pages.
  • £10.00 for sending duplicate copies of the same request to the same person on a disk.
  • £50.00 for sending duplicate copies of the same request to the same person 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.