To think the NHS is far too secretive about our health records?

It really pisses me off too.
when my infant dd was in hospital for her third stay in 2 months, I asked the nurse on her last day (when we were expecting/hoping she would be discharged) if they could show me the records of her stay.
he seemed surprised, went away and came back to say no, it wasn’t allowed. What the fuck! Who had a better right to know whatever was contained there!?
he offered to explain anything I was unsure of instead, but the point was I was so frazzled and sleep deprived and shell shocked that I couldn’t retain or process much aurally and just wanted to read and get everything straight in my head- the timeline, changing diagnoses etc. and of course he didn’t know anything anyway, having just come on shift that morning.

What exactly is it you are trying to do? I use My Chart. I also work in digital health app development (though nothing to do with this one). It generally works really well compared to most apps. But I don’t quite understand what it is you are trying to access. I have cancer, so a lengthy hospital record and I don’t have any trouble accessing any of it. Certainly haven’t needed to submit a SAR for anything!

Legally the notes are the property of the NHS. Procedures in place are actually to protect you. I work in ED and the number of times I have had people call up trying to get information, pretending the patient is their relative, even the police call demanding I release information, journalists try it too….ive even had the family of the assailant try to get information about a victim of an attack.
the procedures in place are to protect you, surely all the security in place is a good thing? even healthcare workers have to go through this to access their own notes. Nothing is 100% secure online, no apps, even facial recognition (this can’t tell me and my sister apart and we aren’t even close in age).

You'd need to blame political decisions imposed on the NHS for the variety of NHS data providers for community, acute and GP providers. Austerity years, dodgy contracts, localised commissioning and the rest.

It's digital in my trust...I was still sent imaging on CDs (I couldn't view) and paper copy records

So write to your MP and ask them to challenge the legislation. I don't know what else to tell you as we don't make up those rules. The government does and we must ask for an ID if request is done remotely (such as via the app). I imagine, not everyone uses their face to unlock the app so there is no way we can verify that you do, is there? I unlock mine with a fingerprint and anyone could have registered their fingerprint using my log in and password.

That (imaging) data is often supplied on CDs.

The NHS has a legal framework to follow for access to medical records...it's different to app data.

It's not Impossible. It's accessible to you with the proof of ID and signed consent. The fact that you don't want to do it doesn't make it impossible.
I work for the NHS and I also think that some things are unnecessarily complicated but we are going by privacy laws and information governance. We are not just making rules up to annoy you and give ourselves more admin work.

That's odd, one of my local hospitals use my Chart and I can acces all my scans and letters and notes they have made. (don't get me started on how different hospitals use different systems though)

Wow, I didn't know it was supposed to be that hard. Maybe my GP dropped the ball because I just emailed the practice and they emailed my records back to me.

I'm with you op. A full SAR is more comprehensive than what you're wanting, anyway, as it'd include every little note and memo they have about you, right down to nurses jotting "11pm, patient xyz was grumpy about being waken for obs".

All you want is the diagnoses and scan results etc. By not making these readily accessible, they're creating more work for themselves.

If you are getting a second opinion from within the same trust, they can usually access all the records anyway. If you are going out of area or to a different provider then they could request anything they need but often prefer to perform their own tests. If your second opinion is private then you can request them but it's not guaranteed you'll get them and you may have to pay for the tests.

It might be now but they won’t have necessarily gone back historically. Some records are made on paper too, for example dh had an A and E admission in 2020 and they still had handwritten notes in addition to digital records, although that has since changed.

YANBU but the NHS would probably he sued into collapse if everyone could access their own records easily 🥴🥴🥴

It's a legal requirement. If you save your password to your NHS app and someone requests your records without your knowledge, then you'll really complain.

A DSAR is separate to your access via the app and more comprehensive. They will include scans of any paper records, scans/xrays which may not yet have been digitised.

Well it's data protection. You can't just say you are signed in on an app so it's fine. I actually don't think we should be able to access as much as we can via the app anyway ( mainly because of vulnerable people not being able to access help if they are being monitored etc) so I definitely think accessing full records needs full consent and ID