Who Will See My Medical Records In A Personal Injury Claim?

Medical records are important evidence in a personal injury claim as they can provide crucial information about a Claimant’s injuries and as well as potentially how and when an accident occurred.

The question of who will see your medical records will depend on the stage that your claim reaches.

Your Solicitor

Initially, your solicitor will request and review copies of your medical records. They will need to see copies of your full GP records as well as records from any hospitals, clinics or other treatment providers you have attended for treatment of your injuries. Access to your full GP records is important to assess whether you have any pre-existing or underlying conditions that could have been affected by the accident. The records will show not only the injuries that you have suffered but will also contain useful information about the treatment you have already received as well as plans for future treatment.

Your medical records can also be used to confirm the date of an accident. For example, if you were unsure of the exact date of an accident but knew that an ambulance attended the scene and treated you, your ambulance records will confirm the accident date.

Your records can also be helpful as evidence of how an accident occurred as they will provide an account of what happened to cause the injuries. In cases where a Claimant is treated by paramedics or seeks medical attention immediately after the accident, these records can be useful in providing a contemporaneous version of events which is likely to be more accurate than a version of events which is recalled weeks or months later.

It is important that the information that you give to your doctors and other treatment providers is accurate as possible as if there are inconsistencies between the entries in your records and information that you later give to you solicitor or any other party then this could be used to undermine your credibility as a witness and could impact on the prospects of your claim succeeding.

Medico-Legal Experts

As part of your personal injury claim, reports from independent medico-legal experts will be obtained as evidence of the injuries that you have suffered as a result of the accident.

The medico-legal expert will review your records as well as have an appointment with you before preparing a report on your injuries and provide an opinion and prognosis. To enable the expert provide a full and accurate opinion, they will need to review your full medical records.

Whilst the expert will review your full records, they will only comment upon entries or issues that are relevant in their reports.

Defendant’s representatives

If Court proceedings need to be issued in your claim, one the stages of the proceedings deals with the disclosure of relevant documents between the parties. The parties are obliged at this stage to disclose any documents relevant to the claim to the other party’s representatives, whether or not they are helpful to their case. In any personal injury claim, this will include your medical records.

This is a requirement of the Court proceedings and therefore has to be done once the claim reaches the relevant stage.

In some cases, the Defendant’s representatives may request access to your medical records earlier in the claim and your solicitor can advise you on whether some or all of your records should be disclosed before the disclosure stage of Court proceedings.

A Judge

If your claim were to proceed all the way to a trial it is possible that some of your records will be included in the bundle of documents that is provided to the Court for use during the hearing. Your solicitor will liaise with your opponent about the contents of the trial bundle and if the certain parts of your records are relevant then they are likely to be included.

Medical evidence and access to records can be a complicated issue and therefore if you are considering making a claim and have questions about this, we recommended that you contact a specialist personal injury lawyer as soon as possible for advice. To speak to one of our legal experts call 0330 822 3451 or request a callback.