Who am I?

I am a GP at Barwell and Hollycroft Medical Centres, two practices in Leicestershire with a combined list size of over 13,200 patients. 

Our case

Since GDPR has come in, the practice has been swamped with Subject Access Requests. Whilst we understand the reasons for this and encourage patients to have access to their medical records, our policy for SARs has been challenged by a solicitor acting on behalf of the data subject (our patient) stating that we must send copies of the medical records direct to them. 

We feel we have fully complied with GDPR; we made the records available to the data subject within the legal timeframe and asked the patient to attend the practice with ID to collect them.

This enables us to ensure the highly sensitive information is given directly to the data subject; they can then check the information that they wish to forward on to their solicitor. We encourage them to take a copy of their information for their personal reference in case they wish to see or use it again in future. We do, however, supply the copies in a tamper-evident bag so that they can send direct to their solicitor if they do not wish to follow our advice.

In this particular case, the data subject's solicitor is not happy with this and have informed the data subject not to collect the records from us (despite her coming to the practice eight times in the 11 months this case has been ongoing).

They are therefore taking us to court - we wish to vigorously defend this and state that we have complied with our legal duties. We hope this will be a test case for all practices to use in future.

How much are we raising and why?

Our legal fees are anticipated to be in the region of £10-15k and would really value your support. 

The amount of time and effort taken so far has been enormous but we feel we need to stand our ground and defend our policy which has been devised to protect our patients and us. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this case page and for your support.