One place for your child's health records (so neither home is guessing)

The folder under the stairs

Ask a separated parent where their child's health records are and you will usually get one of two answers: "in the red folder under the stairs" or "I think your mum has it." Sometimes both. The NHS app has some of it. The GP has a different version. The school has a third. The dentist a fourth. The result is that when you actually need a piece of information — what was in that last vaccination, when the next eye test is, the name of the antihistamine the GP prescribed last summer — it is somewhere, and you cannot find it.

CoOwl's Health Passport is our attempt to fix that. One record per child, shared between both parents, with the practical information you actually need at a glance.

What lives in Health Passport

Six sections, all optional, all per child:

• Profile — NHS number, blood type, known allergies, current GP, current dentist
• Vaccinations — the record so far, with the date of each, the next due, and a quick reference for what the NHS schedule expects
• Medication — current and past prescriptions, with dosage, prescribing doctor, and notes on side effects or reactions
• Appointments — upcoming and past, with who took them, what was discussed, and what follow-up was needed
• Growth and milestones — height and weight snapshots, developmental milestones, anything either parent wants to remember
• Notes — anything that does not fit the other sections: a sleep regression, a food preference, a fear of the dark, a phase

How to use it without it becoming surveillance

There is a version of shared health records that feels like the other parent monitoring your decisions. CoOwl's design tries to avoid this in three ways.

1. It is a record, not a check-in. Either parent can add to it. You do not have to wait for the other parent to do it first. The point is the data, not who logged it.
2. It does not generate notifications. Updating the vaccination record is a quiet act. The other parent only sees it when they next look. There is no "your co-parent just logged a medication" alert.
3. It does not show the source of every entry. The record is shared. Either parent could have added it. The history is there for you if you need it, but it is not surfaced as part of normal use.

These are deliberate choices. We have seen shared parenting apps that treat every log as a notification event, and they make co-parenting worse, not better.

The first week you actually use it

Most families set up Health Passport in one sitting, in about 20 minutes. The pattern that works:

• One parent starts. Open the child's profile, fill in the basics — NHS number, GP, known allergies. Things that are true right now, in both households.
• Pull the red folder out. For 10 minutes, transfer the vaccinations and any current medication into the record. Take photos of paper letters if that is faster than typing.
• Add the next appointment. Whatever is coming up in the next month — the dentist, the eye test, the asthma review — log it once, in the shared record, and both parents have it.
• Set the "next vaccination due" reminder. CoOwl will surface it on the dashboard about a month before it is due. You do not have to remember the schedule.

That is the whole setup. The rest of Health Passport is for adding to as life happens — a new prescription, a growth check, a milestone you want to remember. You do not need to do it all at once, and you do not need to do it perfectly. Done is better than complete.

When Health Passport really helps

The day Health Passport pays for itself is the day you actually need it. The three most common moments we hear about:

1. The A&E visit on the other parent's week. You are at work, your co-parent takes the child to A&E with a suspected broken wrist. The triage nurse asks for the NHS number, the GP, the last medication, the allergies. Your co-parent has the answers in two taps. You get a calm text: "We're at St Mary's, sprained wrist, going home soon."
2. The school trip consent form. "Does your child have any medical conditions we should know about?" — the form asks it every time, and every time you have to remember. The answer is in Health Passport.
3. The first time you forget a detail and the other parent fills it in. This is the one that quietly rebuilds trust. You don't have to ask "what was the name of the new hay-fever thing?" because they have already added it, and it shows up when you open the record.

Privacy and what Health Passport is not

Health Passport data lives in your CoOwl account, on servers in the UK. Both parents can see it. If a child is on Teen View, they can see their own. That is the entire access list. It is not shared with the NHS, your GP, or any third party. It is not used to train any model. The export function gives you a PDF you can hand to a clinician if you want to.

It is not, and is not trying to be, a replacement for the NHS app, your GP records, or the personal child health record (the red book, for younger children). It is the missing layer that ties the information from those sources together, in one place, for both parents.

The case for getting it done this week

Health Passport is one of those features that you set up once and thank yourself for every time you need it. The effort to fill in is small. The value over the next five years is large. If you have been meaning to do something about the red folder under the stairs, this is the easier, shared, searchable version of it.

Health Passport is included on every CoOwl plan. Data is stored on UK servers and is not shared with any third party. The red book is still the legal record of childhood vaccinations in the UK — Health Passport is a shared, searchable complement, not a replacement.