Menopause care is frequently split across several people who do not talk to each other — a GP, a menopause clinic, a gynaecologist, a pharmacist, sometimes a telehealth service in another country. You are the only one who sees the whole picture, and a one-page record you carry is worth more than most things you could buy.
Where we stand: Menova is an independent publication. We sell no apps and no services, we are not your doctor, and this is general education, not medical advice.
Why it matters more now than it did
- Care is fragmented. Your hormone prescriber may not know what your thyroid results are doing, and vice versa — an interaction that genuinely catches people out; see HRT and thyroid medication
- Appointments are short. Handing over a page buys you minutes of actual discussion
- Details decide things. "Some kind of patch" and "50 microgram estradiol patch twice weekly" produce different consultations
- Trends beat snapshots. A ferritin of 40 means one thing on its own and another if it was 90 last year
- Things get missed at handovers — between practices, countries, and services
What to keep
Short enough to maintain, complete enough to be useful.
Medications and supplements. Exact names, strengths, how often, and when you started. Include hormone therapy with the route, vaginal estrogen (routinely forgotten), contraception, and every supplement — several interact with medication, and pharmacists cannot warn you about what they do not know; see how to tell whether a supplement is worth buying.
Test results, with numbers and dates. Not "normal" — the value and the lab's range. The ones worth tracking in this decade: ferritin, full blood count, TSH, HbA1c, lipids, vitamin D, B12. See reading your own blood test results.
Blood pressure, if you measure it at home. A week of readings is worth more than one in a waiting room — see blood pressure and menopause.
Your menopause timeline. When your cycle changed, when symptoms started, your last period date if known, and what you have tried with what result.
Screening dates. Cervical, breast, bowel, bone density — and what the results were. See health screening in your 50s.
Your history. Surgery, clots, migraine with aura, cancer, autoimmune conditions.
Pregnancy history, specifically pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes. Both are recognised markers of later cardiovascular risk and are almost never asked about.
Family history, with ages at diagnosis — breast, ovarian, bowel and prostate cancer, osteoporosis, heart disease, early menopause; see family history and menopause.
Allergies and drug reactions, with what actually happened.
How to keep it
Whatever you will maintain. Options in order of how much they ask of you:
A note on your phone. Free, always with you, good enough. Sync it so a lost phone does not lose it.
A printed page in your bag. Works when your phone is dead and when someone else needs it in an emergency.
A folder for letters and results, paper or scanned, with the one-page summary at the front.
Your health system's patient portal, where one exists — useful, and worth knowing that it usually holds only that system's records, not the telehealth service you used or the private test you paid for.
Our free printable visit prep sheet is designed for exactly this: one page, filled in by hand, handed over. And the free 30-day symptom tracker gives you the symptom side to set against the results.
Both are deliberately paper. Nothing to sign up for, nothing transmitted, nothing stored anywhere.
A note on apps
If you use an app for cycle or symptom tracking, it is worth knowing where the data lives — on your device or on a company's server, whether it is shared with third parties, and whether you can delete it.
This is a personal judgement rather than a rule, and reasonable people land differently. But it is worth making deliberately rather than by default, given that this is reproductive and medical data. Paper raises no such questions — see how to track your cycle.
Asking for your records
In most health systems you have a right of access to your own records. Practical points:
- Ask for results as numbers, routinely, at the time
- Ask for copies of specialist letters — they usually contain the reasoning, which is the part you never hear
- Ask what was written if a consultation went badly. "Could you tell me what's going in my notes about this?" is a legitimate question and often changes what is recorded
- Check for errors. Wrong allergies, medications you stopped years ago, and conditions attributed in error all persist and get acted on
Where it earns its keep
A dismissed symptom. "This has been going on eleven months, here are the dates" is much harder to defer than "a while."
A second opinion. Arriving with your own history means the new clinician is not starting from nothing — see what to do if your doctor says no.
Telehealth. They cannot examine you and often cannot see your records, so what you bring is most of what they have — see your first telehealth visit.
A shortage or a substitution. Knowing the generic name and dose of what you take, and why you are on that route, is what protects you when your product is unavailable — see HRT shortages.
Surgery. Pre-assessment needs your exact products, including vaginal estrogen — see HRT and surgery.
Travel and emergencies. A list in your bag, and someone who knows where it is.
Ten years from now, when a bone density result or a lipid trend from your fifties turns out to matter and nobody has it.
The minimum version
If the full list is too much, keep these four things. They cover most of what gets asked:
- Medications and supplements, with doses
- Last blood results, with numbers and dates
- Menopause timeline — symptoms, last period, what you have tried
- Family history, with ages
Ten minutes to write, and it makes every appointment for the next decade shorter and better.
The free 2-minute Menova self-check gives you a structured symptom baseline to start from — no account, not a diagnosis, and your answers never leave your device.
This article is general education, not medical advice. Keeping your own record does not replace clinical records or clinical advice. Discuss your health and treatment with a licensed clinician.
Sources: NHS — Your Health Records, The Menopause Society, ACOG, and National Institute on Aging — Doctor-Patient Communication.