Medical reports
When we need to ask your doctor for more information about your consultation, tests or treatments.
We’ll need your permission.
When accessing your medical reports, you’re given certain rights, in accordance with The Access to Medical Reports Act 1988 or the Access to Personal Files and Medical Reports (NI) Order 1991.
Your rights
1. You can give permission for your doctor to send us a medical report without asking to see it before they do.
2. You can give permission for your doctor to send us a medical report and ask to see it before they do.
- You’ll have 21 days from the date we ask your doctor for your medical report to contact them and arrange to see it.
- If you don’t contact your doctor within 21 days we’ll ask them to send the report straight to us.
- You can ask your doctor to change the report if you think it’s inaccurate or misleading; if they refuse, you can insist on adding your own comments to the report before they send it to us.
- Once you’ve seen the report, you can withdraw your permission for it to be sent to us.
3. You can withhold your permission for your doctor to send us a medical report.
If you do, we’ll be unable to see whether the consultation, test or treatment is covered by your policy, so won’t be able to give you a pre-authorisation number or confirm whether we can contribute to the costs.
You also have the right to ask your doctor to let you see a copy of your medical report within six months of it being sent to us.
Your doctor can withhold some or all of the information in the report if in their view the information:
- might cause physical or mental harm to you or someone else or
- It would reveal someone else’s identity without their permission (unless the person is a healthcare professional and the information is about your care provided by that person)
