Ombudsman Velislava Delcheva has asked health minister Katya Ivkova how far the merging of a child's health and vaccination records from before and after a full adoption has got. The ombudsman's office said so.

The recommendation is dated 2 October. It follows a complaint from an adoptive mother in Sofia, who cannot get full data on her child's vaccines. She needs it for nursery, where the child was due to start on 1 October this year.

The woman wants a clear procedure for bringing the data from before and after the adoption into one electronic file in the National Health Information System (NHIS). In her complaint, she insists that adoptive parents should not face extra red tape and that children should not lose access to services.

The ministry has already acted on the case. It told the mother it has set up a working group with several agencies. The group must look at the legal and practical ways to merge the child's records. It will also draw up a procedure for a single electronic health file after a full adoption. And it will prepare changes to Ordinance No. N-6 of 2022, which governs how the NHIS works.

Delcheva asks whether the group has finished, whether the changes to the ordinance are ready, and when the system for correcting and merging the records of adopted children will start working in practice. She also wants to know when and where the final rules, written guidance and application forms will be published.

The ombudsman also wants to know what instructions the regional health inspectorates will get and how soon they will start to apply them. She asks what the procedure will be if there are problems with the user interface of the electronic health file. She insists that parents and adoptive parents get clear guidance on what to do so that all of the child's health data enters the NHIS.

Delcheva expects the ministry to tell her how far it has got with its commitments, what the deadlines for the rules are, and how citizens should deal with such cases.

She made another recommendation a week earlier, to Ivkova and to the head of the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), Assoc. Prof. Dr Vladimir Daskalov. She then asked that children's vaccinations be recorded automatically in their electronic files. She also recommended discussing whether the fund should enter missing data in the NHIS on its own or at parents' request. That way, children and parents would not have to prove things the system already holds.

In both cases, the ombudsman says, the issue is how reliable and complete the electronic health files are, and how institutions share information. Technical and administrative difficulties, she says, should not block children and their families from health and education services.

The ombudsman's office says that in an adoption the records must be merged correctly, in line with legal requirements and the protection of personal data.

Updated (16.10, 13:22): The child was due to start nursery on 1 October 2026, not 1 October this year as first reported, bntnews.bg says.