Clinical case notes

LHSA hold just over 100 collections of twentieth-century folder-based patient case notes. That is approximately 1 million individual case note files.

The majority of the case notes relate to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, but other hospitals are represented.  As a whole, the collections cover a wide variety of medical specialties and were produced by numerous practitioners.

As the collections date from within the last 100 years, strict restrictions on access to them apply because of the personal data they contain. However, if you wish to consult any of our case note collections, there are procedures in place to allow access to these records for research purposes.

Case notes contain a surprising number of documents relating to patient care, as well as pro-forma record sheets and patient-doctor correspondence; they can also include lab reports, X-rays, photographs and other visual representations.  Some of the collections are held on microfilm, created by the hospitals themselves, before disposing of the paper originals.

Case notes can be difficult and time-consuming to use, and great care must be taken when handling them, however, they are an extraordinarily rich primary archival source relevant to a variety of historical, social, scientific and medical disciplines.  Many case notes have significant links to other LHSA records, for example, general registers of patients, ward and operations books and bound case notes.  Please contact us for more information.

We hold case notes relating to hospitals in the Lothian region, clinical specialties, and individual practitioners.

Medical Records Revived: Case Note Catalogues at LHSA

Thanks to funding from Wellcome, we have produced item-level catalogues describing over 56,000 individual tuberculosis and neurosurgery case notes. The catalogues outline the nature of each case without identifying detail, protecting the privacy of individual patients whilst opening up these (often difficult to navigate) records for research. The Medical Records Revived resource is a gateway to these catalogues, also providing user-guides and context to key people, themes and places.


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