How to submit medical reports
Commonly, you will need to submit Medical Reports about any conditions you have in a format acceptable to the CAA.Reports submitted in a format unacceptable to the CAA will be rejected and unfortunately, rejected reports will often return to the ‘back of the queue’ causing significant delays in considering your case.
It is vital that the content and quality of submitted reports is adequate to avoid these delays (and the additional work caused to all involved).
Emailing or texting me photos of crumpled, barely legible bits of paper such as the example below won’t do:
Steps to successful report submission:
Guide whoever is preparing the report for you.
Wether it's your GP or a specialist’s report, they need to know what it is the CAA are looking for.
The CAA website has a lot of detail on many conditions (flowcharts) and produce specification for medical reports. You should give this guidance (flowcharts) and report specification to whoever is producing a report about you. You will need to search the CAA website for your condition to see if there is a CAA flowchart for that condition and a Report Specification for that specialty area.
An example is a common condition called atrial fibrillation.
Were you to have this condition and the CAA needed a report about you from a specialist, you should give the specialist the CAA flowchart shown here
and the CAA report specification for cardiology reports
shown here. The specialist will use these to ensure CAA mandated tests are carried out and use the report specification to build a report which the CAA will accept.
Being as familiar as possible with your condition and the CAA requirements for that condition will help you gain or retain medical certification.
Much of what you need to know appears on these pages.
I will routinely guide you as to what’s needed.
You will need to prepare and send the reports.
Commonly, the reports and results will be sent to you by your GP or specialist and you will need to send them onwards to me. Rarely, the GP or Specialist will send reports directly to the CAA or your AME. You will need to guide the process by being clear who is doing what. Either way, email is the preferred method.
How should you prepare the reports?
Scan the report FLAT, using a scanner so that each report forms a single PDF document. Ensure the report has at least 2 personal identifiers (from Name, DOB, Address and CAA ref no). Please don’t send me pictures of free hanging bits of folded paper !!. JPEGs, GIFF, WMP or any other format will not be accepted. ONLY PDFs WILL DO.
If you are sending me more than one report in a single email, each report / document should be a single PDF. So if you have one two page petter from your GP and one three page report from your specialist, you will email me two PDF documents one with two pages and one with three pages.
Name the report PDFs like this:
Surname, Forename, CAA ref No, Subject
So in the example above. Your email to me will have two documents:
Bloggs, Joe, CAA123456A, GP Letter
Bloggs, Joe, CAA123456A, Surgeons Report
Common mistakes:
- Anything other than PDFs
- Not labelling the PDFs properly
- The report / document you're sending me not having al least 2 identifiers
- Incorporating several reports all mixed up into on long multipage document
- Splitting single reports into multiple PDF documents.