The health and social care professionals who provide you with care, miantain records about your health and any treatment or care you have received previously (e.g. NHS Trust, GP Surgery, Walk-in Clinic, Social Care Package etc). These records help to provide you with the best possible health and social care.
Records may be held in electronic or manual format, and may include the following information:
- Details about you, such as address and next of kin.
- Any contact the surgery has had with you, such as appointments, clinic visits, emergency appointments etc.
- Notes and reports about your health
- Details about your treatment and care
- Results of investigations, such as laboratory tests, x-rays etc.
- Relevant information from other health professionals, relatives of those who care for you and know you well
To ensure you receive the best possible care, your records are used to facilitate the care you receive and will be shared with other health and social care professionals to aid decision making about your total care package. Information held about you may also be used to help protect the health of the public and to help us to manage the NHS. Information may be used for clinical audit to monitor the quality of the service provided. Where we do this, we take strict measures to ensure that individual patients cannot be identified.
Some of this information will be held centrally and used for statistical purposes. The surgery will always endeavour to gain your consent before releasing the information.
Should you have any concerns about how your information is managed at the surgery, please contact the Practice Manager to discuss how the disclosure of your personal information can be limited.
Confidentiality
Every member of staff who works for an NHS or Social Care Organisation has a legal obligation to keep information about you confidential. Anyone who receives information from an NHS or social care organisation has a legal duty to keep it confidential.
We maintain our duty of confidentiality to you at all times. We will only ever use or pass on information about you if others involved in your care have a genuine need for it. We will not disclose your information to any third party without your permission unless there are exceptional circumstances (i.e. life or death situations), or where the law requires information to be passed on.
Partner organisations
We may also have to share your information, subject to strict agreements on how it will be used, with the following organiisations:
- NHS Trusts, Specialist Trusts, Independent Contractors such as dentists, opticians, pharmacists
- Private Sector Providers & Voluntary Sector Providers
- Ambulance Trusts, Clinical Commissioning Groups, Social Care Services
- Local Authorities, Education Services, Fire & rescue Services, Police, Other ‘Date Processors
Patient Privacy Notice V9.1 August 2023