DON'T FORGET ...... Manoeuvre I: Have a backup recorder to record any discussion which results in the main recorder being turned off. Manoeuvre II: Use your backup recorder to record any discussions which arise when replaying a conversation to someone else from your main recorder. Both situations can be interesting.

Thank you for that link. I will print out that page and add it to my articles to show a doctor who might become unduly worried about me recording my consultation.

You may be interested in an article by Rich Cahill in which he offers advise to doctors as to how to avoid letting patients record them. It's worth reading the original article to see the way he develops his rather strange argument. Here are a couple of quotations. "Despite these potential benefits, it’s typically not the best course to allow patients to record the appointment." "It is recommended that patients be advised unequivocally that digital recordings by handheld devices, such as smartphones, are prohibited on the premises in order to protect the privacy of other patients and staff in compliance with federal and state privacy laws." https://thedoctorweighsin.com/what-to-do-when-patients-want-to-record-their-doctor-visits/ Cahill goes on to suggest that policies could be developed which would prohibit recording! He writes as an American and I can't say how many of his suggestions would be permitted here. The author is completely ignoring the extremely useful ability to recall exactly what was mentioned in the consultation which a recording provides. Not one of Cahill's arguments to prevent a recording can match the importance and usefulness of this for the patient.

I was thinking that too. I've gone for the silver one.

That might look a bit like a tiger. Heh heh! .

I recently bought a small dictation machine and am thinking of getting another like it (I use two recorders in consultations with one in full view and the other hidden away as a back up.) My model of recorder come in shiny black or silver and I was wondering which colour people think is the most non-threatening to the doctor when put on the table and left in view. SHINY BLACK seems self-effacing but on the other hand it could look a bit purposeful when you started looking at it. SILVER seems a bit more eye catching although when you start looking silver seems more friendly and less-purposeful. Thoughts please.

In order to avoid protracted arguments about the admissibility of an audio recording, it may be simpler to write up the consultation by hand while using the audio recording as a reminder of what took place. If you subsequently need to rely on the recording as evidence then it could be produced but if it gets contested and declared inadmissible, you still have your detailed written notes as a sort of evidence. I have to confess I'm no expert on the rules of evidence but that is what I would do.

Hello Legion. Thank you for drawing our attention to the document: "Patients recording NHS staff in health and social care settings" (May 2016). I chased it up and found it listed along with other guidance publications on this web page belonging to NHS Protect: http://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/3641.aspx. Amongst the publications listed there I noticed one called: "Unacceptable behaviour – Guidance on warning letters and other written communications". This is a direct link: http://bit.ly/22CkNsv In the text of that document, it gives as an example of anti-social behaviour They should really have explicitly excluded doctor consultations in case a reader misunderstands what rights a patient actually has. .

Hello BazzaS. I agree that there is a difference between my friend's case and recording doctor's consultations. However my friend's case illustrates some of the pitfalls if a recording of a consultation later gets used to proved to a medical institution what a doctor said. In this instance the medical director tried to disregard the recording by saying it wasn't the voice of the doctor. As the toxic relationship progressed, my friend was almost completely writing the doctor’s law essays. I think his English was so poor that he was lucky that any language test for foreign doctor’s was, in those days, too easy but this has been changed now. You outline some useful courses of action. Unfortunately this is now all in the past. My friend went down the complaints procedure route. Predictably enough, the hospital trust tried hard to derail her case and in the end succeeded by appointing an investigator who was a close colleague of the doctor involved. Subsequently, she found it hard to get treatment for her bulimia and other anxiety problems. This all became so unsettling that she had to leave her university where she was studying her law degree and never went back. As it turned out, as I imagine is often the case, my friend's need for medical help was too great for her to successfully challenge the system. My Turn

As the number of recordings you make increases then the need to index them properly becomes more important as I am finding out for myself. I simply label the recording with the date and the main people present. I also keep the unique number my dictation machine assigns to the recording. That's it. I try to remember to speak the date at the beginning of the recording but I usually forget and, anyway, it wouldn't help organise my audio files. I wonder if anyone can offer any hints and tips, perhaps from indexing other types of audio recording, that I might use. Thank you in advance. My Turn

I rather suspect the American courts will disabuse the author, Craig Klugman, of that notion when they determine the exact amount of substantial damages to be paid to the patient. Of course the patient was not, as he suggests, "playing gotcha". I am perfectly sure the patient would have been more than happy if the medics had not insulted and abused her. Recording their abusive behaviour is not "playing gotcha". That outdated school of thinking based on the right of the privileged to routinely abuse the vulnerable and the perpetrators feel offended when they are caught out. My Turn

This post is about recording doctors but with a difference. It also touches on the quality of recordings. A friend of mine has bulimia and some years ago she was being treated by a psychiatrist as it was interfering with her life. At the time she was a mature student studying for a law degree at a good university. By co-incidence her new psychiatrist was himself taking a course in medical law in order to later undertake medico-legal work. As English wasn't his first language, he asked my friend in one consultation if she could proof read a law essay he had written. She read it and made amendments which he was very pleased about. She later told me the essay had needed considerable adjustment. The psychiatrist later asked her to write one of his law essays and reluctantly she did. This didn't end there and he started to ask for more and more help with further essays but she became extremely uncomfortable about it. She found herself in a difficult situation because she needed the psychiatrist to treat her bulimia and couldn't just walk away from the planned treatment as she may not get offered an alternative psychiatrist but, at the same time, she didn't want to write his essays for him. Out of desperation she skipped several appointments. The psychiatrist then started to phone her at home asking for help with his essays and he would ring 6 or 7 times a day. It got to a stage where she wouldn't answer any telephone calls at all including those from me. The psychiatrist would leave messages on her answering machine asking her to contact him to help and then he would ring again if he hadn't heard from her. She, like many bulimics, is of a very anxious disposition and, as she lived alone, she found all this extremely intimidating. After weeks of this crazy situation, one day she grabbed her answering machine and took it with her to meet the medical director of the hospital. She told him what had happened and played him several messages from her machine. After hearing a few the medical director turned to her and asked, "Are you sure that's Dr ABC? I don't think it is. It doesn't sound anything like him." And that is the point I'm trying to make. If you have some noisy muffled recording then it may be hard to prove who the doctor is if ever you need to at a later date. Your noisy muffled recording may be good enough to jog your memory about what happened in the consultation, which itself if very useful, but that may be all. I suppose a forensic voice analysis may help identify the speakers but that's not the sort of thing which many people, including my friend, can afford. So it could be long hard slog to get a medical director, who has just developed mysterious problems with his hearing, to accept the identity of who is on the recording. This is one reason I think it can sometimes be important to have a good quality recording in case the identities of those present is questioned. The review of dictation machines I posted recently on 10th April 2016 compared an iPhone and found the iPhone to be poorer then the dictation machines. I was intrigued enough by the review to buy their recommended model which I am now testing. By contrast those very cheap audio recorders for £10 that I see on eBay and Aamzon may be a great bargain but they may be a false economy in certain circumstances. Well, to come back to my friend's experience, it was by a total stroke of luck that just as the medical director asked his question about who it was, my friend and the medical director could hear the next recorded message starting up with "Hello, this is Dr ABC". How sweet. I agree that may not have been 100% proof but it quickly helped the medical director to put aside his mystery deafness. Unfortunately, the hospital trust went on to manipulate the complaints process shamelessly in order to bury my friend’s complaint despite such strong evidence but that's another story. If anyone has any comments on this then it would be interesting to hear them. My Turn

I came across these audio clips which compare the audio recorded in different environments by some dictation machines as well as an iPhone. I wonder which of the settings is most representative of a medical consultation? It's tempting to assume a consultation is always in a quiet room but there are times when this is not so. boardroom, classroom, cafe, lecture room soundcloud.com/wirecutter/sets/audio-recorder-test-round-one food court, office, park soundcloud.com/wirecutter/sets/audio-recorder-test-round-two The audio clips above were made for this rather interesting review of voice recorders: http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/the-best-voice-recorder/

The Washington Post article suggests that she effectively had no choice. "From the start, Easter was troubled that she didn’t trust her own surgeon, but she was in too much pain to cancel the operation." I have been in a similar situation where I have had a bad experience with some doctors but they are the only ones in town in that specialty and I find it hard to travel. I searched Aamzon for USB style voice recorders similar to the one that patient put in her hair and was interested to see saw they cost less than £15. Some cost only half that. They're small enough to put on your key ring. However several of them have the sort of glitches which could drive me to despair. For example, only starts recording after 15 seconds, needs the date entering each time, takes 8 hours to charge up, loses the audio file if battery runs out while recording, and so on. In circumstances when I am recording medical matters, I need reliability.

Here's a brief article I saw online. If you're interested, Google shows several other reports about this advice. http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2016/03/86558-2/?utm_source=newsletter

Hello Tillandsia. If you can carry off such a reply with total lack of concern then the doc may be none the wiser. However if you start blinking, dilating your pupils, blushing or stutter your words then the conclusion which will be drawn is that you are in fact recording. I foresee a knee-jerk reaction which may be made all the worse on account of your semblance of guilt. My own approach is to deny it. After all, if you're asked the question by a doc then it shows they are concerned and if you confirm their fears is not going to make him feel better, especially as it was being done covertly. Whatever you do respond you need to think it through in advance. There isn't enough time in the split second you get to reply to work out the pros and cons.

The right to record, openly or covertly, seems well established according to clear advice given by the medical insurance companies. The question is: what do you do if you get asked if you are recording covertly? Saying "no" would be easiest but if you had to play the recordings later to a third party then could it be claimed the recording was obtained under false pretenses and therefore can't be accepted? Saying "yes" runs the risk of inappropriate knee-jerk reactions from the doctor and this is not exactly conducive to getting good medical care. Declining to answer might seem the best way but the situation will inevitably be seen as you are recording. Unwanted knee-jerk responses may also occur based on this assumption. I have been asked this question by a doctor and have answered "no" even though it wasn't true. What should I say next time?

I have just noticed that in this Twitter message, Glyn Elwyn posts a link to a free copy of his Patientgate article which appeared in the BMJ. https://mobile.twitter.com/glynelwyn/status/443760069071892480 His BMJ link is this below. Many people will not have seen the article because it's usually behind a paywall. http://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g2078?ijkey=YIzyRP7LaYLZS6W&keytype=ref

Surely that doctor who records recording all his patients almost certainly without their permission, is breaching GMC guidelines and also breaching the Data Protection Act. Did he provide his or her name? I suspect not.

Apologies if this has been mentioned already. In mid-December Pulse Magazine wrote this: I didn't see the answers because I'm not a member of the web site. It may be a fine point but I found it interesting that the author calls it "our consultation" because I tend to think of it as the patient's consultation. -- My Turn

I once made a complaint to a hospital and was invited to a large meeting. Needless to say, I wanted to record the meeting and this time I asked in advance. There were all sorts of comments about my request but clearly they could hardly refuse to hold the meeting on account of it being recorded. So they asked if they could have a copy of my recording which I happily provided. I felt that giving them a copy was to my advantage because if I raised a serious matter in the meeting then they could hardly say they didn't know about it. Unfortunately, I subsequently encountered such deviousness in handling the complaint that it got nowhere, even though I was being helped by a reasonably experienced advocate.

Two years ago, MP Anne Clywd (with Prof Tricia Hart) published a big report into NHS complaints handling after she had lost her husband in hospital in unfortunate circumstances. She didn't get much joy as this news story shows. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-27119059 If an MP who has closely examined the workings of the NHS complaints system can't get any redress then less well-connected people may not have much chance. Other countries health systems seem to do better at this than the NHS.

I wonder if there are two parts to the problem of audio-recording consultations with doctors. (1) There is the right to record and this right is getting more and more clearly stated by the relevant bodies - such as medical insurers. (2) There is the right to use what was recorded and this can be more problematic. This touches upon what Sali and I have been discussing about how to get the health system to take action when wrongdoing is brought to their attention. However it's all very well having the principle of using what was said in a somewhat obscure legal right but it's another to get an inappropriately irate individual to read or hear what was said in an important discussion. I believe this thread some time ago discussed the case of Amwell View School -v- Dogherty in which it was established that an employee of a school could use a covert recording as evidence in an employment tribunal. Also Section 36 of the Data Protection Act 1998 permits a private individual to store recordings of others (provided no other law is broken, such as voyeurism, in making them). These are rights which apply more broadly than to recording your doctor. In my own case, a builder was recently doing some major work on the house and had been given some clear verbal instructions and in return he had given verbal assurances. When things went wrong he wasn't pleased at all to know I could quote what was said and indeed could replay it from my recording of the meeting which I had made without telling anyone. Quoting Amwell & Dogherty or Section 36 doesn't count for much when confronted by an irate builder who has messed up some building work. Ha! There is a parallel between this and doctors. If you have a recording of what was said in a consultation and use it to remind yourself and later find medical matters have taken a turn for the worse by not following what was done, then you are in the same situation. How do you get anyone to listen to this without going bonkers about "my human rights not to be recorded" or whatever nonsense they dream up. In fact, you can aggravate the situation by alienating people who incorrectly think you have done something wrong. I have experience of this in a medical setting too. The massively adverse reaction by my GP to my "Patientgate" recording meant I subsequently ran the risk of being struck off for the slightest fault. Consequently I would not see a GP without someone else present and having someone with me was so difficult to arrange that I had only 3 GP consultations in 3 years whilst extremely sick and in need of referral to specialists. Yes, I recorded my GP's highly unprofessional reaction on another recorder (just as the "Patientgate" article in the BMJ describes) but who was going to listen to it? As it happened, no one.

Hello Sali. I'm very sorry to hear about your loss. To be honest, I don't think any of the official channels for handling patients' concerns work well at all. It seems to have been like this for a long time. If anything, it's now worse because legal aid has been withdrawn for medical negligence and few people have the funds to take on hospital and doctors.

Hello Sali, I used to belong to a patient group which was one of the predecessors to the current Patient Participation Groups. I vaguely recall that it was called the Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) forum which later became a Local Involvement Network (LINk) forum and which later still became a Patient Participation Group (PPG). Or something like that. This group I attended was a somewhat half-hearted affair and I suspect there is a huge amount of variation in effectiveness from one group to the next. I think these groups originally came into being in order to give patients a voice (the group I was in also had the valuable right of unannounced physical access to may parts of the hospital). However not all patient populations are equally effective at organising themselves. You mentioned above that GPs or other medical bodies can ignore recommendations of PPGs but I seem to recall that PPGs submitted an annual review to some official body such as the Care Quality Commission and their submission held a particular status as the view of patients. In addition, I recall I attended some of my local council's Health Scrutiny Committee meetings at which very senior members of the local hospital would attend and often get lambasted by councillors. Members of the public could attend such meetings but did not have a right to speak (unless called upon by the chairman). To judge by the total absence of other members of the public at the few meetings I attended (as part of my familiarisation with how such committees worked) and the excessively fawning attention me and my friend were given, I think such meetings rarely have outside observers. As my patient group was rather non-confrontational, I had intended to raise in private a matter of concern with one of my councillors with a view to him raising it at one of these committee meetings (as a matter of policy rather than of personal grievance). Unfortunately I became so ill that I wasn't able to see this through but nevertheless such meetings, if they still exist, seem a useful vehicle for flagging issues to the local hospital.