Using our services

We provide a specialist, free-of-charge enquiries service for all researchers and members of the public. Please contact us directly.

If you require any assistance identifying items that might be relevant to your research, please contact us and we can advise you. We are a very small team and cannot carry out more general historical research on your behalf. Instead, our role is to help identify records from which researchers may find the information they require.

We cannot help with the following types of enquiries:

• As LHSA is not part of the NHS or NHS Lothian, we are unable to advise on NHS Lothian issues, current medical treatments, medical training, employment or work experience.  You will find this type of information on the NHS Lothian website.

  Access NHS Lothian website.

• We do not hold birth certificates. The National Records of Scotland can provide you with copies of birth certificates.  [LHSA holds birth records of several Edinburgh maternity hospitals. However, these do not carry the same weight as birth certificates.]

  Access the National Records of Scotland website.

• We do not hold any GP records. To obtain copies of your own records, please contact your current GP

If you wish to consult any items from the LHSA collections in person, you can book a desk in the Centre for Research Collections Reading Room. This is located on the 6th floor of the Main Library, University of Edinburgh, 30 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LJ.

Appointments must be made at least a week in advance of your visit so that we can ensure LHSA staff are available to help with your enquiry and that the material is ready for you and open to access.

Further information about visiting in person is available from the Heritage Collections pages.

There is a registration process to use the Reading Room. You must complete the Heritage Collections registration form in advance of your first visit. This can be found at the bottom of the Regulations and Registration page.

Closure periods and restrictions 

There may be instances where items in our collections are unavailable for consultation. This may be due to one or more of the following:

• The item contains sensitive, personal data and is restricted under the provisions of UK data protection legislation.
• The item is designated as ‘closed’ (as a rule, personal health records of deceased individuals are closed for 75 years (100 years for children) following the last recorded entry for the patient). Access can be permitted in certain cases.
• The item is too fragile or requires conservation.

We will normally advise you whether or not collection items are open or closed when you contact us. 

Both the Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation (2016) make provision for research access to confidential records containing special category data, as long as that data is used subject to appropriate safeguards (robust anonymisation, for example).

Read General Data Protection Regulation (2016).

Read about special category data.
 

Permission to access confidential records

We can work with legitimate researchers (including individual members of the public) to apply for responsible access to records that would otherwise be confidential. Legitimate researchers are either relatives of deceased individuals or academic researchers inside a named institution or research project. Decisions on access to records are made by the NHS Lothian Caldicott Guardian, who oversees how confidential personal information owned by the NHS can be used in research. 

If we need to make an application to the Caldicott Guardian, we will advise on the information we need from you. For example, relatives need to provide proof of death for the individual (if not proven in the records we have found), their own postal address and a simple confirmation of their relationship to the deceased. Academic researchers need to provide a precise list of records they wish to access, a statement of their research, and a letter of support from their institution or project sponsor. 

Please note that these applications can take about eight weeks from start to final decision on access. Therefore, academic researchers who plan to use personal data under 100 years old are advised to contact us well in advance of any proposed visit. Academic research applicants will also need to agree to our information security conditions, which will include robust anonymisation, access only in our reading room, and no photography.

Photography of LHSA items in the Reading Room is not permitted under any circumstances (with no exceptions). This is a condition on access to the collections set by their owner, NHS Lothian.

If images are required, LHSA staff can take a limited number for you (up to 20) free of charge, or we can place an order for you through the University’s Cultural Heritage Digitisation Service (there is a cost attached to this). A range of items from the LHSA collections have already been digitised and can be viewed on the Image Collections website.

Check Cultural Heritage Digitisation Service information.