£180 for a medical report from GP?

[Kittley]

I had to go to a hospital in Turkey a month ago due to pneumonia and had a scan and saw a specialist and prescribed meds. I was there for about 3 hours and the hospital is charging roughly 1,000 euros to my travel insurance. Already paid the £100 excess when we were at the hospital. I thought it was all sorted as spoke to the insurance company at the time. A month after, they're sending me emails about it and now they're saying I need to pay £180 directly to my GP for my GP to provide them with my medical report as evidence that I have no underlying illness related to the pneumonia (which I don't). This seems very expensive, am I wrong in thinking under GDPR that I can request my own medical records from my GP without having to pay this much?

Well the medical report is non NHS work so the GP practice can charge what they like for it.

For information I think £180 is cheap. You should look at what lawyers charge!
(I'm an NHS consultant). My barrister relative would charge 6 times that for a report.

Whether you can try to get out of paying it by requesting your medical records and providing them to your insurance company is somewhat up to them. They may want the information to be synthesised by a qualified doctor or they may not.

Check the terms and conditions of your travel insurance.

If you want a report you have to pay.

Otherwise yes you can request your records. But records are usually over 200 hundred pages long, and insurance companies cant be bothered to go through it all, so might not accept it, and may request a report. Check with your insurance company.

That’s cheap for a medical report, our occupational health charges £500.

£180 is a lot but it’s not the GP’s job to do letters for insurance so seems fair enough to me from their perspective.

You could request your notes for free but it’s not going to be quick so I guess it’s up to you. Assuming the travel insurance T&Cs say this is how it all works, which I assume they do? Have you read them?