April/May 2019 (vol. 15/6)

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Expert Witness: Subject access requests

What to do when you are asked for occupational health records

Summary:

Subject access requests are causing concern among GPs worried about the time it takes to fulfil their legal obligations. But they are also being used increasingly within occupational health, which raises a number of important issues for OH professionals and their organisations. OH legal expert Diana Kloss explains.

Over the past year, a great deal of publicity has been given to the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the changes it has made to the right of data subjects to ask for a copy of their medical records. General practitioners (GPs), in particular, have seen a rise in the number of requests and complain that this has increased their administrative overload at a time when the service is already over-stretched. Research by the British Medical Association1 showed that subject access requests (SARs) to GPs had increased by one-third in the second half of 2018, after the GDPR came into force, and that more than three-quarters of the requests came from third parties, such as solicitors, on behalf of patients…..

Diana Kloss is a barrister, former part-time employment judge, Acas arbitrator and author

Author: Kloss D

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Occupational Health at Work April/May 2019 (vol. 15/6) pp35-37

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