As the Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH) grapples with how it will move paper medical records from its current site to be available to staff once the new hospital opens, a records agency estimates there could be up to 400,000 paper files from the past two years alone.
Health Information Management Association president Jennifer Gilder told 891 ABC Adelaide there were protocols for how long medical records had to be kept.
“Most public hospitals need to keep their records at least a minimum 15 years and then some of the private hospitals it might be seven years,” she said.
“But then it depends on whether there’s a mental health record — it might need to be kept longer.
“When you’re looking at children’s records or a newborn you must keep that until the child reaches the age of 18, and then you keep it for a few years after that.”
Ms Gilder has estimated the volume of recent material alone at the current RAH.
“With a paper-based system, say at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, you’re looking at 300,000-400,000 records that need to be stored there alone. That would only be your primary storage for say two years,” she said.
The new hospital, currently nearing completion at the western end of North Terrace in the city, will need to store paper records off-site at a secure facility, a recent memo indicated, because its design had not provided for on-site storage.
Medical records benefit patients, but also researchers
The director of State Records in SA, Simon Froude, said it highlighted why agencies, including the state’s public hospitals, were making a transition to electronic storage.
“I would imagine that over the next five or so years most agencies will be looking to update their systems and make sure that they’re appropriate to manage electronic records,” he said.
Ms Gilder said medical records were of vital importance for the patient, their treating clinicians, and medical researchers.
“We not only use this health information for patient care, good quality care, it’s also kept for research purposes,” she said.
“Most people who’ve got chronic illnesses are coming in and out of the same hospital, so those records become very large.”
Hospitals have clear guidelines about when they can destroy old records but Mr Froude said the hospitals, and other government agencies, currently had a freeze on disposal of any records considered likely to be required for royal commissions.
“So you look at the current royal commission into child sexual abuse and the institutional response and there’s a lot of information there across a whole range of agencies that might be relevant,” he said.
“We’ve worked with those agencies, we’ve worked with the Crown Solicitor’s Office and also the royal commission itself, to make sure we’ve got as many guidelines in place as we can — it is quite an onerous job.”
He said anyone keen to obtain a copy of their personal records, whatever the reason, could directly approach the relevant public hospital or make a freedom of information request.