Registering at a GP - Medical Records
 

My family and I are soon to be moving from the UK to the RoI. We have about the best health insurance through my job, and we've found a good GP happy to take us.

Question about medical records:

We don't want our new GP in RoI to contact our GP in the UK. We're happy to get our medical records from the UK before departing, but we don't want any communication from our Irish GP to our UK GP.

Is this likely to be a sticking point?

Is the NHS permitted to send any of our information to another country without our express consent?

Can the Irish GP refuse to take us on grounds that we don't consent to them contacting our UK GP?

Cheers

Re: Registering at a GP - Medical Records
 

Hi There,

20 years ago we moved from the UK to ROI and then 4 years ago we moved from Ireland to France.

In both cases the question of transferring records from GP to GP only appeared in 'help on relocation' type books. In practice when we raised this question we were met with bemused looks. I get the impression that you would specifically need to demand the transfer of records if you so wished.

None of our GPs have been in contact with the others as far as we know.
Hope this helps.

Re: Registering at a GP - Medical Records
 

Thanks for that. Yes that was the impression I had formed.

The issue arose because the GP we spoke to in Dundalk (perhaps because she was English herself) said she would request records from the UK.

Re: Registering at a GP - Medical Records
 

Yes, I would tend to agree, I doubt an Irish doctor would even think about it and a French one (language difficulty) prefers to start from scratch and create their own file.

Re: Registering at a GP - Medical Records
 

My wife confirmed things with the GP in Dundalk today. It seems that the confusion was because, in her words, it had never happened before??!!

We said that our GP wouldn't transfer the records overseas, to which the GP replied, "oh well, don't worry about it then".

Seems it was a lot of fuss over nothing.