How Long to Keep Client Records in BC

The number everyone quotes for how long to keep client records is a floor, not an answer. British Columbia's health-records legislation sets a minimum, and your professional college frequently sets a longer one. When those two disagree, the college standard is the one you are held to, and it is the one most clinics never check.

The floor, and where it comes from

BC's Health Records (Medical) Act requires a health service provider to retain adult records for a minimum period after the last entry in them. The college of registration for your discipline then layers its own requirement on top, and in several professions that requirement is longer than the statutory one.

This is the detail that catches people: the statute is not wrong and it does not expire. It is a floor. If your college says sixteen years and the statute says ten, you are not permitted to destroy the record at ten.

Check your own college before anything else

Whatever else you do, find your college's record-keeping standard and read it end to end. It is a public document, it is usually a page or two, and it answers the question the statute cannot. For physiotherapy, chiropractic, counselling and several other regulated professions, the number practitioners quote in practice comes from the college and not from the Act.

Adolescents are the case people get wrong

For a record belonging to someone who was a child when you saw them, the clock does not simply start from the last visit. It runs from the date they reached the age of majority, plus the same period that applies to adults. So a record opened for a fourteen-year-old in 2010 has a long way to run, and the arithmetic is not the kind you want to do in your head during a busy year.

The majority age is not the same in every province, either. Nineteen in British Columbia, eighteen in most others. If a client moved between provinces, the longer of the two is the safer reading of what you owe them.

A retention policy is not a deletion schedule

These get confused more often than anything else on this list. Setting a policy tells you which records are past the period you have adopted, so you can review them. It does not destroy anything on its own, and in Whenaro it deliberately cannot. Approving a record as past its retention date is a decision a person makes; the physical disposal of it is a separate and deliberate act.

That separation is there for a reason. A calendar that quietly deleted client records on a schedule would, sooner or later, destroy something a legal hold or a complaint needed you to keep.

The exception you must know about

If anything about a client is in dispute, or a legal hold is in place, disposal stops. Not slows down, stops, and it does not resume on a date. It resumes when the hold is released, by a person, with a reason recorded.

A reasonable starting position

Most clinics do best with a short written policy that names their college standard, sets the period for each category of record, and says who reviews the list. It does not need to be sophisticated to be useful. What it does need to be is written down, so that the answer to "why do you still have this" is a document rather than a recollection.

What to do this week

Find your college's standard, write it on one page next to your retention settings, and check whether your current practice matches it. That single afternoon closes the gap that turns into a complaint two years later.

Where to read further

The federal floor applies everywhere, and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada explains what a health information custodian actually owes and what happens when it goes wrong in its guidance on responding to a privacy breach. For the provincial and college layers, start with your own regulator rather than a search engine: they are the only source that can tell you the number your profession is held to.