Medical examiners use case

Healthcare providers are legally obliged to provide medical examiners with medical records relating to deceased individuals for the purposes of reviewing a death. As these individuals are deceased, they are not covered by UK GDPR - however, there are still obligations under the Common Law Duty of Confidentiality. 

Medical examiners have a legal right to access the records of deceased patients and there is a legal obligation for healthcare providers to provide the records to medical examiners under the Access to Health Records Act 1990. As such, the duty of confidentiality is overridden.

To support medical examiners, we have updated the GP Connect Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) and National Data Sharing Arrangement (NDSA), and adjusted our transparency.

A GP Connect update is available for medical examiners to enable access to review the deceased patient's record within 28 days after the patient's death. Suppliers wishing to update systems to provide support for medical examiners to review the deceased patient's GP-registered clinical record within 28 days after the patient's death, should submit a use case: Direct Care APIs use case submission form - NHS England Digital.

If you are a medical examiner who wants to have access to GP Connect, you should talk to your IT lead or system supplier and get them to submit a use case.

View the progress of system suppliers against our specifications.

Contact [email protected] for further details.