Patient identifiers (hospital ID, DOB, Age, Sex, Reference numbers)

The UK Council of Caldecott Guardians has given advice on the use of patient identifiers in logbooks. Gone are the days of marking DOB, hospital ID, name and sex. There is now clear guidance on what you can and cannot store on your logbook.  

The guidance is that there should be no unique identifiers included in a logbook.  Entries are allowed to include:

• Age (not DOB)
• Unique reference number (not hospital number)
• Sex

Medberry adheres to this guidance and allows you to select an age range as per the Anaesthetic College report, alongside sex.

If you wish to include a reference or exact age then please do so in the notes section of the log book. We may upgrade the database to include Age but have other priorities at present. 

Hope that helps

Happy logging!

ps. The long version goes a little bit like this:

"Maintaining patient confidentiality when auditing trainee records

In their portfolios, trainees should record the age (but not the date of birth) and gender of the patient and assign each one a unique case number.

If a clinical supervisor needs to verify the information in a trainee’s portfolio and it is not possible to obtain patient consent, the trainee should provide that supervisor with the list of unique case numbers along with the hospital identity number and the patient’s age and gender. That is, this further information about the patient is restricted to the supervisor to enable him/her to carry out the audit. The information should not be included within the e- portfolio system, it should not be collected ‘just in case’ it might be needed, and it must be confidentially destroyed when no longer required."