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Access to your medical records - Subject Access Requests - (SARs)

Under the General Data Protection Regulation 2018, you, or an authorised representative, are entitled to access your health record. This can include (but not limited to) solicitors, veterans agency, the department of works and pensions and the police. 

How to access your record

Please telephone the SARs department (01223 639974 or 01223 639979) to request a form or email papworth.sars@nhs.net giving your name, date of birth and address, alternatively please download the appropriate consent form here:

You will be required to provide two forms of identification, one will need to be proof of address.

Please return the consent form to the SARs Department together with your copies of identification to: 

SARs Administrator
Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Kingfisher House
Kingfisher Way,
Hinchingbrooke Business Park,
Huntingdon,
Cambridgeshire,
PE29 6FH

Or email address: papworth.sars@nhs.net

Fees and receiving your record

Generally, no fees are applicable under GDPR, However, if the request is deemed excessive or is duplicated, there could be a fee applied.
Under article 12 of the General Data Protection Regulations, it states that:
Where requests from a data subject are manifestly unfounded or excessive, in particular because of their repetitive character, the controller may either: 

  1. Charge a reasonable fee taking into account the administrative costs of providing the information or communication or taking the action requested; or refuse to act on the request. 
  2. The Trust has decided that if a request is deemed excessive and is more than 1000 pages long, then we reserve the right to charge for the request. The charges are as follows:
  • £0.10 per page for every page more than the first 1000 pages.
  • £10.00 for duplications of same request to same recipient on a disk.
  • £50.00 for duplications of same request to same recipient on paper.

Upon receipt of request, an initial assessment will be completed and if found to be excessive and potentially over 1000 pages, the Trust will contact you to seek approval to proceed with approximate charges. Once approval has been granted, the request will be acted on and an invoice will be raised and payment will be required before release.

We do ask applicants to be specific about which episodes of treatment they wish to have copies of and to complete the application as fully as possible. 

The process takes approximately one month and the information will be provided as per your instructions on the consent form. 

For more information please go to https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/your-right-to-get-copies-of-your-data/

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