ABSTRACT
Richard Fitton is a general practitioner whose clinic is in Greater Manchester, near where Shipman practiced. He signed the cremation certificate for one of Shipman’s patients, was interviewed by the police and testified at his trial. Dr. Fitton was a long-time advocate for providing patients with access to their medical records. He had started to advocate for patient access to their medical records as early as 1993 but faced an uphill battle. In the early years, local administrators and medical leaders reprimanded him for his advocacy and suggested that the very idea was mad. When the National Health Service in England began putting patient records into a shared electronic database, Dr. Fitton wondered if he could do something to ensure the accuracy of his records before they were loaded into the national database. Ten years later, about 500 of Dr. Fitton’s patients use the system. They report loving the access it provides.
