Correcting inaccurate hospital medical records

Medical records and the right to have inaccurate information corrected or deleted is governed primarily by the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018, alongside NHS-specific guidance and professional record-keeping standards.

Your right to rectification:

Under Article 16 of the UK GDPR, you have the right to have inaccurate personal data rectified without undue delay. This applies to medical records held by NHS trusts and other healthcare providers. If factual information in your records is wrong, for example a wrong date of birth, an incorrectly recorded allergy, a diagnosis attributed to you that belongs to another patient, or a procedure noted that never took place, the hospital should correct it.

The distinction between fact and clinical opinion:

Hospitals will often distinguish between factual errors and clinical judgments or opinions. If a clinician recorded their professional opinion at the time, for example a working diagnosis or an assessment of your symptoms, the hospital may refuse to delete or alter that entry even if you disagree with it. The reasoning is that it was an accurate record of what the clinician thought at the time, even if later events proved the assessment wrong. In that situation, the usual compromise is that your disagreement or a corrective note is added to the record rather than the original entry being deleted.

Your right to erasure:

Article 17 of the UK GDPR provides a right to erasure in certain circumstances. However, this right does not apply where the processing is necessary for reasons of public health, for the provision of health or social care, or for archiving purposes in the public interest. In practice, hospitals will rarely agree to delete medical records entirely, because they are required to retain them under NHS records management policies (the NHS Records Management Code of Practice sets out minimum retention periods, which can be lengthy, for example 25 years or even longer for some categories of record).

How to make the request:

1. Put your request in writing to the hospital's data protection officer or patient services team. Identify clearly what you say is inaccurate and explain why.

2. Provide any supporting evidence, for example a letter from another clinician, test results, or other documentation that demonstrates the error.

3. The hospital must respond within one calendar month, though this can be extended by a further two months in complex cases.

4. If the hospital agrees the information is factually wrong, it should correct the record. It should not simply delete the original entry as if it never existed; standard NHS practice is to strike through the incorrect entry (so it remains legible), note the correction, record who made the correction and when, and add the accurate information.

If the hospital refuses:

If the hospital refuses to make the correction and you believe the information is genuinely inaccurate, your options include:

1. Ask for a written explanation of the refusal and escalate through the hospital's complaints procedure (PALS in the first instance, then a formal complaint).

2. Complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which can investigate and order rectification if it finds a breach of the UK GDPR.

3. In persistent cases, you can apply to the court under section 167 of the Data Protection Act 2018 for an order requiring rectification.

Practical considerations:

If the inaccuracy is causing you real harm, for example affecting your ongoing treatment, triggering inappropriate prescriptions, or being relied on in insurance or employment contexts, make that clear in your request. Hospitals are more likely to act swiftly where patient safety is engaged.

If your concern is with a clinical opinion rather than a factual error, pushing for deletion is unlikely to succeed. A more realistic outcome is an annotation or addendum recording your disagreement and the correct position as you see it. This is well-established in NHS complaints handling.

If you want, I can help you draft a rectification request letter to the hospital, or talk through what to do if they have already refused?