Two of the legal questions most frequently asked by dental clinics have to do with deadlines:
- WHAT DEADLINE DOES THE PATIENT HAVE TO CLAIM?
- HOW LONG DO I HAVE TO CUSTODY THE CLINICAL HISTORY?
Regarding the first question, the "patient claim deadlines”, as usually happens in law, there is no single answer; It depends. It depends, first, from whom to claim. If the patient is going to complain to the dental clinic, the term will depend in turn, from when the treatment is finished:
- Treatment completed before 7/10/2000: Can no longer claim.
- Treatment completed between 7/10/2000 and 7/10/2005: The patient will have 15 years since the end of treatment to claim.
- Treatment completed between 7/10/2005 and 7/10/2015: You can claim, regardless of the time that passes, until the 7/10/2020.
- Treatment completed after 7/10/15: The claim period
It is 5 years since completion treatment.
The person responsible for such gibberish was the legislative reform that, in the year 2015, reduced the patient's claim period from 15 a 5 years - term currently in force- incorporating a transitional period to avoid retroactive application of the rule. To this we must add, also, that the patient can not only claim to the dental clinic, you can also claim to the healthcare professional who has treated him and who is at the service of the clinic. In this case, the claim period is reduced and simplified: 1 year.
Secondly, and as for the “term of custody of the medical record”, Again, a distinction must be made between the term that the law requires and the term that the lawyers recommend.
Article 17 of the law 41/02 Autonomy of the Patient requires that medical records be kept in a minimum of 5 years. Data related to the patient's birth are excepted (including biometric test results, medical or analytical) that are necessary to determine the relationship of filiation with the mother, that are not destroyed. It should also be noted that, some Autonomous Communities have extended the term in some cases, such as Galicia (indefinitely), Cantabria (15 years) or Catalonia (15 years).
The above terms are minimum legally required terms, However, our recommendation it has to be different. When a patient claims, the essential proof of the process, which will determine in the vast majority of cases whether health professionals have acted correctly or not, is the medical history.
As we have seen at the beginning, patient claim deadlines range, according to the assumptions, between 1 and 15 years, so it is illogical that a medical history is kept 5 years required by the Patient Autonomy Law, if we are facing a longer claim period since, in this case, we would deprive the healthcare professional of the best evidence to defend their work.
Thus, recommendation is to keep the medical records for the same period that the patient has to claim, which, although they currently coincide in 5 years, in treatments completed before October 2015, may differ markedly.
Who Said Law Was Easy?