Free medical chronology template (UK)

For fee-earners and paralegals building a chronology by hand · ~3 min read

What's in it

• A patient details block — name, date of birth, NHS number, matter reference — kept separate from the chronology so it isn't repeated on every page;
• A ruled chronology table with Date, Event/Presentation, Provider, Category and Source columns, ready to fill in;
• A worked example row showing the level of detail a good entry needs;
• Short instructions on ordering, sourcing and categorising entries.

How to fill it in

• Work through the records in date order and add one row per significant event — presentation, investigation, diagnosis, treatment, review;
• Keep each entry short and factual: what happened, who by, and the key finding;
• Always complete the Source column with the document and page number — an entry you can't trace back to the record has to be re-checked by hand later, which is exactly the time a chronology is meant to save;
• Use Category to flag anything bearing on causation, condition or prognosis so it stands out on a long list.

For the full picture of what separates a usable chronology from a merely present one, see what a medical chronology actually is and how it fits into a full indexed bundle.

When filling it in by hand stops making sense

A template like this works well for a handful of documents. Past a few hundred pages, working through every record by hand and keeping the source column accurate becomes the exact bottleneck this article's guidance is trying to help with. That's the point at which most firms move to an automated chronology — the same table, populated automatically from the full record set, every entry still cited to its source page.

Template provided for general use on your own matters; not legal advice. No data from this download is collected or transmitted — it's a static file.