Law courts and clinical documentation

Abstract

Background. Until 2004, requests for clinical documentation proceeding from the Judicial Administration on Specialist Care of Pamplona were received in six different centres and were processed independently, with different procedures, and documents were even sent in duplicate, with the resulting work load. This article describes the procedure for processing requests for documentation proceeding from the Law Courts and analyses the requests received. Methods. A circuit was set up to channel the judicial requests that arrived at the Specialist Health Care Centres of Pamplona and at the Juridical Regime Service of the Health System of Navarra-Osasunbidea, and a Higher Technician in Health Documentation was contracted to centralise these requests. A proceedings protocol was established to unify criteria and speed up the process, and a database was designed to register the proceedings. Results. In the course of 2004, 210 requests for documentation by legal requirement were received. Of these, 24 were claims of patrimonial responsibility and 13 were requested by lawyers with the patient’s authorisation. The most frequent jurisdictional order was penal (43.33%). Ninety-three point one five percent (93.15%) of the requests proceeded from law courts in the autonomous community of Navarra. The centre that received the greatest number of requests was the “Príncipe de Viana” Consultation Centre (33.73%).The most frequently requested documentation was a copy of reports (109) and a copy of the complete clinical record (39). On two occasions the original clinical record was required. The average time of response was 6.6 days. Conclusions. The centralisation of administration has brought greater agility to the process and homogeneity in the criteria of processing. Less time is involved in preparing and dispatching the documentation, the dispatch of duplicate documents is avoided, the work load has been reduced and the dispersal of documentation is avoided, a situation that guarantees greater privacy for the patient.