Question
How do I get copies of my health records and information from NSW Health hospitals?
Answer
We don’t know, but we emailed Mrs Jillian Skinner, the NSW Minister for Health, yesterday asking her and we’ll let you know her reply, if we get one.
A few months ago, one of our readers complained to us that when she’d requested copies of the health records and information to which she was entitled to under the Health Records and Information Privacy Act, 2002, from a NSW doctor, he’d said, (a) that he didn’t have any, and, (b) that any that existed were held by the NSW Health Hospital in which he’d treated her. But that her requests to the NSW Health Hospital concerned for copies had been ignored.
So we wrote to the NSW Health hospital concerned ourselves, but didn’t get anywhere either.
So we wrote to Mrs Skinner asking what could be done. Four or five months later we got a reply from her telling us what the NSW Health Hospital concerned OUGHT to be doing – nothing about what we could do if they weren’t doing it and certainly nothing about what she might do if they weren’t doing it.
Such typical Jillian Skinner stuff!
So we’re not really optimistic that we’ll get anything useful from her this time either.
With Jillian Skinner, and the Baird Government generally, they are so hopeless that it’s obvious that:-
(a) they are not prepared to allocate the resources to enable questions their constituents have to be emailed back in less than four or five months or more, and,
(b) a lot of the time they don’t answer questions at all, presumably because the don’t feel that they have a good answer to give.
We feel the latter may apply in this case – that, in fact, NSW Health hospitals are amongst the worst offenders when it comes to breaking the law as far as health records and information are concerned.
Feel free to email us at any time using info@questionsmisc.info, and if we’ve got an answer from Mrs Skinner, we’ll let you have it – hopefully within a day or so!