Confidential notes

Some notes are more sensitive than others — a counselling session, a test result, a safeguarding concern. You can mark any note confidential. A confidential note can only be read, searched, edited or downloaded by people whose role includes confidential access. Everyone else sees only a locked entry.

How it works

Confidential access is its own permission line, separate from ordinary notes access, so giving a role Clinical Notes access never gives it confidential access by accident.

To open a confidential note, a person needs both:

1. View on the Clinical Notes line, and
2. View on the Confidential Clinical Notes line.

The Owner has confidential access automatically. Everyone else gets it only if you give it to their role.

Marking a note confidential

Anyone who can write or edit notes can tick Confidential note — when writing the note, or later by editing it.

Important: once a note is confidential, only people with confidential access can open, edit or delete it — including the person who flagged it. If you tick the box without having confidential access yourself, the form warns you: "once saved you won't be able to open or edit this note again." After saving, you'll see a message rather than the note.

Only someone with confidential access can remove the flag.

What people without access see

They see a locked entry in the list:

• a padlock,
• the words Confidential note,
• the note's date (and the patient's name on the all-notes list).

That's all. They don't see who wrote it, its type, its title, its priority, its tags, how many files it has, or a single word of what's in it.

• Selecting a locked entry shows "This note is confidential" and who to ask.
• It never appears in search results. Searching for a word that appears only in a confidential note finds nothing, so nobody can work out what a hidden note says.
• It leaves the list whenever they filter by type, priority, tag or author, for the same reason.
• Its files can't be downloaded, and it is skipped by bulk changes.
• Insights count it (as "Confidential") but never break it down by type, priority, tag or author — see Notes Insights.

Giving a role confidential access (Owner)

1. Go to Roles & Permissions and open the role.
2. Find Clinical Suite → Confidential Clinical Notes.
3. Tick the actions you want:

4. Save.

The role also needs the matching action on the ordinary Clinical Notes line. Edit or Delete on the confidential line without View does nothing.

A common setup is to give confidential access only to your pharmacist-in-charge role and keep it away from front-desk roles. Your eight starting roles don't include one called "pharmacist", so decide which role suits your business.

What is recorded

BusinessCopilot records confidential-note activity in the workspace Activity feed (people whose role includes audit access can open it, for example from Team → View Activity on a person):

• every time someone opens a confidential note,
• every file download from one,
• every attempt to open one without access (shown as a warning),
• every time a note is marked or unmarked confidential,
• ordinary edits and deletes, as for any note.

The Activity feed never contains the note's text, its title, or its file names — only that something happened, who did it, and when. Reading an ordinary note is not recorded.

Good to know

• The Recycle Bin shows only a date. A deleted note appears there as "Clinical note - Sep 21, 2026", never with its title, so a confidential title isn't exposed to someone who can browse the Recycle Bin.
• A change to a role applies straight away where it matters. The moment you remove confidential access, that person's requests for confidential notes are refused. Their own screen can take a few minutes to catch up and stop offering buttons they can no longer use.
• Confidential means restricted inside your business. It isn't a substitute for your own privacy and record-keeping obligations.

Related

• Writing a clinical note
• Files on a note
• Getting access to the Clinical Suite