Accessing records of a person who has died

Overview

These pages explain our approach to handling requests made to access records of people who have died.

We appreciate this is likely to be a distressing time for you, and we wish to make the application process to access these records as stress-free as possible.

Rights of Access

A Personal Representative of the estate of the deceased (a person holding the Grant of Probate or Letters of Administration) can request access to a health record under the Access to Health Records Act (AHRA) 1990.

There is no equivalent automatic right of access to other deceased records from any applicant, unless the request is made under a court order. The Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA) and UK General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), which allow an individual to access their records, does not apply to these requests as the legislation only relates to living individuals.

We'll therefore action any requests for these records by a Personal Representative on a case-by-case basis, following the guidance of the AHRA.