We frequently request medical reports and medical records for such purposes as assessing a client’s fitness for certification, to arrange specialist referral, to forward to the CAA Medical Department or other aviation authority or other agency, and so on. Some clients are successful in obtaining comprehensive reports from their GP or specialist without any input from us, which we encourage because it saves us work; others are less successful. Reports and records can be posted to us, or scanned and e-mailed; in all cases they must be written in English, or professionally translated by an accredited translation agency into English. If you opt to e-mail scanned documents to us, please read on!

Please note the terminology:

A medical report is written by the applicant’s GP or specialist, in response to a request by the applicant, AME or aviation authority.
A medical record is a pre-existing record, held by an applicant’s GP or specialist following consultation and investigation due to symptoms or illness, and may include laboratory reports on blood tests, imaging reports such as exercise ECG, Xray or CT or MRI scan reports. Sometimes just the report is required, sometimes the report and hardcopy is required – the hardcopy means such things as the exercise ECG paper tracing (typically 25-30 pages), Xray disc (ie CD/DVD nowadays – a photographic film in the past).
If our assistance in obtaining medical records or medical reports is required, we will e-mail a standard request to the applicant. The applicant prints the form, handwrites the name of the doctor or healthcare professional in the addressee field, signs and dates the form, and passes it to the appropriate healthcare professional.

Scanned documents: We are able to accept scanned documents, but they MUST comply with ALL of the following requirements:

1. Use a proper scanner, not a mobile phone or tablet. Use pdf format ONLY.
2. Use grayscale ON or OFF as appropriate, bearing in mind the required quality and nature of the document. Unnecessary use of grayscale is wasteful of storage media resources – the pdf file is typically 15 times bigger than the same document scanned with grayscale off. Only use colour for scans of colour reports, eg corneal topography charts.
3. Use an appropriate resolution, eg 200 dpi for most documents, 250 – 300 dpi for documents such as ECGs which need to be reported.
4. Scaling should be 100% – ie if document is printed out, it is about the same size as the original, without extra borders.
5. Orientation should be correct – eg a landscape format document may need to be rotated 90 degrees so that the text is upright.
6. Send multiple-page documents as a single pdf file. If your scanner will not do this – use software to assemble it. If neither your scanner nor software will do this, post it.
7. Send one document per pdf file – not multiple documents per file.
8. Document title format – Surname, Forename, CAA Ref No, Name of author, type of report, date of consultation (without punctuation, eg Smith John 235469G Dr Finlay Neurology report 2017-08-17). Some documents may contain 2 dates, eg clinic date and date letter was typed – use the clinic date. For 24 hour ECG or BP recordings use the start date.
9. Attach the pdf files to an e-mail addressed to [email protected] – do not include it within the body text of an e-mail.
10. Open the document and check that it is complete, easily readable in its entirety, and quality is satisfactory.

If you do not have the equipment or expertise to send scanned documents in accordance with the above, please post good quality photocopies instead.