Privacy: Direct Care, (routine care and referrals)

This practice keeps data on you relating to who you are, where you live, what you do, your family, possibly your friends, your employers, your habits, your problems and diagnoses, the reasons you seek help, your appointments, where you are seen and when you are seen, who by, referrals to specialists and other healthcare providers, tests carried out here and in other places, investigations and scans, treatments and outcomes of treatments, your treatment history, the observations and opinions of other healthcare workers, within and without the NHS as well as comments and aide memoires reasonably made by healthcare professionals in this practice who are appropriately involved in your health care. 

When registering for NHS care, all patients who receive NHS care are registered on a national database, the database is held by NHS Digital, a national organisation which has legal responsibilities to collect this data.

NHS GPs have many patients for whom they are responsible and to facilitate efficient and accessible services your GP delegates tasks and responsibilities to others that work with them in their surgeries.  They will also share your care with other organisations, predominantly within the surgery but occasionally with outside organisations and particularly with local partner practices forming part of your GPs Primary Care Network (PCN) with whom your practice works closely and collaboratively to provide the most flexible and accessible services for patients.  This will mean that GPs from other local practices will at times have access to your full GP record but only when providing direct care to you.

If your health needs require care from others elsewhere outside this practice we will exchange with them whatever information about you that is necessary for them to provide that care. When you make contact with healthcare providers outside the practice but within the NHS it is usual for them to send us information relating to that encounter. We will retain part or all of those reports. Normally we will receive equivalent reports of contacts you have with non NHS services but this is not always the case. 

The sharing of your data, within the practice and with those others outside the practice engaged in your direct care is allowed by Law.

People who have access to your information will only normally have access to that which they need to fulfil their roles, for instance admin staff will normally only see your name, address, contact details, appointment history and registration details in order to book appointments, the practice nurses will normally have access to your immunisation, treatment, significant active and important past histories, your allergies and relevant recent contacts whilst the GP you see or speak to will normally have access to everything in your record.

You have the right to object to our sharing your data in these circumstances but we have an overriding responsibility to do what is in your best interests. Please see below.

We are required by Articles in the General Data Protection Regulations to provide you with the information in the following  subsections.