Safeguarding patients who already have access to their online health record

For patients who have access to their online health record, it may be necessary for specific record entries to be redacted in order to prevent harm or distress to the patient or others. This may include redacting information permanently or withholding information temporarily until they have had an opportunity to speak with the patient, such as, for sensitive test results.

The importance of safeguarding patients from harm is paramount.

The NHS Safeguarding Reference group for Online Record Access would like to understand more about any safeguarding issues and risks that may have occurred involving online access to health information so that we can identify opportunities to improve our guidance and training resources.

Use the form below in addition to your local safeguarding reporting systems.

For guidance on how to redact specific record entries, watch our how-to videos: 

To ensure a patient can not see an abnormal result online before talking to a patient, either:

1. Leave the result unfiled
2. File the result and then edit the online visibility settings of that individual result immediately afterwards to “do not display on the online card record"

EMIS have added a button next to the result when in the filing phase that can be toggled and have applied an update so that any data toggled to “do not display on the online care record” in one area of EMIS will have this same instruction applied within all areas of EMIS. The abnormal result can also be selected in the ‘Investigations’ tab and online visibility settings changed using the right click button.

Further information is also shown in the EMIS video shown on this page.  

Dr Devin Gray, Clinical Lead for Digital First (Wandsworth) has developed a flowchart to help guide practices with managing document workflow ( including EMIS, TPP, Docman).

A copy of this document is also available to download from NHSFutures (login required).