Paper short abstract:

Building on 25 interviews conducted with patients having access to their medical records in a primary care surgery in Northern England, this contribution discusses how patients with access to their medical records engage in practices of self-monitoring.

Paper long abstract:

Primary care records, containing detailed data about patients' medications, illnesses, GP and hospital consultations are a tool for GPs to collect medical information throughout the life of a patient and use it to make sense of their condition. Patient access to their GP records via a computer or a mobile phone can be considered as a form of self-monitoring. This low-tech self-monitoring practice is going to be increasingly more frequent in NHS England where GP surgeries are required to offer patients full access to their medical records through digital platform by 2018. By being able to access first hand information about their health and care, patients are expected to be more in control and proactively improve conditions for their wellbeing. But how are these expectations playing out in practice?

Building on 25 interviews conducted with patients having access to their medical records in a primary care surgery in Northern England, in my contribution I discuss how patients with access to their medical records engage in practices of self-monitoring. In particular, I focus on the relational aspect of these practices and the interdependence of family, institutional and care relationship in the construction of the self-monitoring space.

Because of its low-tech and mundane character digital access to health records offers an interesting angle to understand practices of self-monitoring and emerging normativities therein.