Guidance for patients and service users

Records are an essential part of health and care. Records include:

• the notes which the health and care professionals caring for you take about your care
• information which is used to run the NHS and social care (for example human resources records of the staff that care for you and the minutes of your hospital’s board meetings)
• information used for research (for example information about clinical trials)

Records come in different shapes and sizes. For example, a record may be a letter on paper, an email, a photograph, an X-ray, a text message, or even a plaster mould. 

To help ensure that these records are all managed consistently across England, we publish a Records Management Code of Practice. This provides important information to those responsible for managing records. It includes guidance on topics such as what the law says about managing records, how to file and store records and how long records should be kept for.  

Different records are kept for different lengths of time. Most records are destroyed after a certain period of time. Generally most health and care records are kept for eight years after your last treatment. GP records are kept for much longer. However this is being reviewed to ensure they are not kept for longer than necessary once you have left your GP practice (for example if you moved abroad or died). Some records are considered valuable in the longer term, for example for research. They can also enable the public to understand how an organisation worked in years to come. This includes records such as patient surveys. 

You have a right to obtain a copy of your personal data. This is commonly referred to as "subject access". You can obtain a copy of your personal data by making a Subject Access Request.