You CAN read your medical notes — but brace yourself!

DID you know that you’re entitled to read your medical notes? You can do this either by asking your GP or by registering for GP online services.

But before you do, be warned: you may not like what you see. I’ve been following an amusing thread on Twitter about some less-than-flattering things written in notes. One patient saw herself described as ‘pleasantly obese’, another was less than thrilled to read she was ‘dishevelled’. The person who sounded most offended was a woman who read in her daughter’s notes, ‘there is nothing wrong with the child, the problem seems to be the mother’. Even so, medical notes are more tactful now than when I was at medical school, when we were warned not to write rude and cryptic shorthand comments such as FLK (Funny-Looking Kid) and GOK (God Only Knows).

A paper in the American Journal of Medicine published in 2018 offered some tactful approaches — for example, ‘the patient does not consume alcohol’ is preferable to ‘the patient denies drinking’.

Although I’m all for openness, it could backfire. A GP was telling me recently that one of his patients insists on having loads of investigations — and is so resistant to any suggestion there is a psychological component to her problems that no one dare write this in the notes, in case she sees them and complains.

Not only are all these investigations very expensive for the NHS, but they are clearly not helping the patient resolve her real problems.