TempoLife › Features › Hospitals, emergency care and waiting lists › records-and-complaints

Your records, a second opinion, and how to complain

What the national portals hold, the access rights that apply on top of them, and the ladder a complaint climbs — which is not the same ladder as a compensation claim.

This page explains how the system works. It is not a diagnosis, it cannot tell you how urgent your own situation is, and it is not a directory: it carries no clinic addresses, opening hours or visiting times, because those change and a wrong one sends you to a closed door. If someone may be seriously ill or injured, call the emergency number — 112 across the region, 113 for medical emergencies in Norway — and if you are unsure, call your country’s advice line rather than deciding from a web page.

What the portals hold, and what they do not

Every country in this family runs a national patient portal, and between them they hold much the same material: prescriptions and what has been dispensed, referrals, laboratory and imaging results, vaccination records, discharge summaries and, importantly, a log of who has opened your file. Two things are usually missing. The first is the working notes — the clinician’s free-text record is often not exposed in the portal even though it exists, and getting it is a separate request. The second is anything from a private provider that is not connected to the national exchange. If a document matters to you, check that it is actually there rather than assuming.

You have access rights beyond the portal

The portal is a convenience; the right of access is a legal one and it is wider. Under the EU General Data Protection Regulation you may request a copy of the personal data held about you, including health data, and health legislation in each of these countries adds its own patient-record access provisions on top. That means you can ask a hospital directly for the full record rather than the portal extract, you can ask for a correction where something is factually wrong, and in several of these systems you can restrict which clinicians may open which documents — Estonia is explicit about this, and the access log will still show if a document was opened. Restricting access has a real clinical cost, so it is worth doing deliberately rather than reflexively.

A second opinion is a normal request

Asking for a second opinion is not an accusation and is a recognised part of these systems. The practical way to do it is to ask the treating clinician directly, in those words, and to ask for the referral and the results to go with it — a second opinion without the imaging is a guess. If the relationship has broken down, the route is usually through your own family doctor, who can refer elsewhere. For planned surgery it is worth remembering that the surgical opinion and the anaesthetic assessment are separate, and that a decline for one reason does not settle the other.

Complaint and compensation are different ladders

This is the distinction that saves the most wasted effort. A complaint is about how you were treated and aims at an explanation, an apology and a change; it starts locally with the ward or the hospital’s patient representative or ombudsman, and escalates to the national supervisory body — the Health Board in Estonia, IVO in Sweden, the Patient Safety Authority in Denmark, the equivalent inspectorate elsewhere. A compensation claim for injury is a separate process with its own body, and in the Nordic countries it is typically a no-fault scheme: you do not have to prove that anyone was negligent, only that the injury was caused by the treatment and was avoidable. Filing one does not replace the other, and the time limits differ.

How to make a complaint that works

Write it down early, while the dates are exact. Say what happened, when, who was present and what you want — an explanation, a correction to the record, a change in practice, or an apology; a complaint without an ask tends to receive a defence rather than an answer. Attach the record if you have it. Keep it factual and short; the reader is deciding what to investigate, not who to sympathise with. Send it to the local level first unless the matter is serious enough for the supervisory body, because local resolution is faster and the escalation route stays open afterwards. And note the deadline: supervisory bodies and compensation schemes both have time limits, and they are shorter than people expect.

Sources: Health Board (Terviseamet) — Estonian supervision of health services · Health and Social Care Inspectorate (IVO) — Sweden · Danish Patient Safety Authority · Health Inspectorate (Veselības inspekcija) — Latvia · checked 2026-09-08

Frequently asked questions

Related pages