: UK - Doctor's access to family info Situation: My NHS doctor asks me "Do you have any history of X in the family?" (X can be anything you like: cancer, insanity, arthritis, sarcasm etc, doesn't matter, I'm more interested

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

Let's assume or pretend for a moment that a system such as the one you suggest exists. I see two immediate problems, both related to medical privacy:

your doctor is not necessarily your mother or grandfather's doctor. Why should a doctor be able to look at the medical records of someone they're not treating? Have your family members all consented to let any and all future doctors read through their records? Have you?
as you mention, you may not know all the illnesses in your family. Imagine if one day your doctor said to you, "because your mother has X, I think we should check you for it also" and this is how you learned some shocking news about your mother. If the only information your doctor has comes from you, there's no chance of telling you something you don't already know. If the doctor were to try being vague and just suggest checking you for X, that won't always work - many people would think "why test for that so young? Someone in my family must have it. I wonder who?" and start the detective process.

Then there's adoption. If you were adopted and don't know who your birth parents were, is it ok with you if your doctor knows? And gives you nuggets of information about illnesses they've acquired since you were born? If not, then this too will be a giant blank spot since whether or not your adoptive parents (your real parents) have heart trouble isn't interesting from a medical point of view.

Then there's the matter of UK residents whose parents or grandparents are not UK residents and therefore have no records with the NHS. Even if a system existed and the legal and privacy issues could be overcome, your doctor isn't going to get access to any family members who live elsewhere. I live in Canada and have relatives in England, so I know this is a real thing.

A system that correlated and cross referenced everyone into families, using birth, marriage, and adoption records, so that a doctor could just click "see family history" would be expensive to build and a privacy nightmare if it was hacked. And at the end of it all, it would have blank spots and missing information. It would leave the doctor at risk of telling you things you weren't supposed to know. So all that money would create a flawed and possible even harmful system.

Better by far to ask you. You might not know, it's true. But then again, you might. I know what my grandparents died of and the one parent I have lost. Diseases mild enough to be kept from an adult child are also mild enough not to be interesting medically. The "ask the patient" technique may not be perfect, but it's cheap, portable, privacy-respecting, and overall - good enough.