How we use your personal information
This Privacy Notice explains why the GP practice collects information about you and how that information may be used.
Health care professionals who provide you with care maintain records about your health and any treatment or care you have received previously (e.g. NHS Trust, GP Surgery, Walk-in clinic, etc.). These records are used to help to provide you with the best possible healthcare.
NHS health care records may be electronic, on paper or a mixture of both, and we use a combination of working practices and technology to ensure that your information is kept confidential and secure. Records this GP Practice hold about you may include the following information;
- Details about you, such as your name, address, carers, legal representatives and emergency contact details
- 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 or those who care for you
To ensure you receive the best possible care, your records are used to facilitate the care you receive. Information held about you may be used to help protect the health of the public and to help us manage the NHS. Information may be used within the GP practice for clinical Audit to monitor the quality of the service provided.
Some of this information will be held centrally and used for statistical purposes. Where we do this, we take strict measures to ensure that individual patients cannot be identified.
Sometimes your information may be requested to be used for research purposes – the surgery will always gain your consent before releasing the information for this purpose.
Risk Stratification
Risk stratification data tools are increasingly being used in the NHS to help determine a person’s risk of suffering a particular condition, preventing an unplanned or (re)admission and identifying a need for preventive intervention. Information about you is collected from a number of sources including NHS Trusts and from this GP Practice. A risk score is then arrived at through an analysis of your de-identified information using managed software and is only provided back to your GP as data controller in an identifiable form. Risk stratification enables your GP to focus on preventing ill health and not just the treatment of sickness. If necessary your GP may be able to offer you additional services.
Please note that you have the right to opt out of your data being used in this way.
Medicine Management
The Practice may conduct Medicines Management Reviews of medications prescribed to its patients. This service performs a review of prescribed medications to ensure patients receive the most appropriate, up to date and cost effective treatments.
The care.data programme – collecting information for the health of the nation
How do we maintain the confidentiality of your records?
We are committed to protecting your privacy and will only use information collected lawfully in accordance with:
- Data Protection Act 2018 and General Data Protection Regulation 2016
- Human Rights Act 1998
- Common Law Duty of Confidentiality
- Health and Social Care Act 2012
- NHS Codes of Confidentiality, Information Security and Records Management
- Information: To Share or Not to Share Review
Every member of staff who works for an NHS organisation has a legal obligation to keep information about you confidential.
The practice 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), where the law requires information to be passed on and / or in accordance with the new information sharing principle following Dame Fiona Caldicott’s information sharing review (Information to share or not to share) where “The duty to share information can be as important as the duty to protect patient confidentiality.” This means that health and social care professionals should have the confidence to share information in the best interests of their patients within the framework set out by the Caldicott principles. They should be supported by the policies of their employers, regulators and professional bodies.
Who are our partner organisations?
We may also have to share your information, subject to strict agreements on how it will be used, with the following organisations;
- NHS Trusts / Foundation Trusts
- GP’s
- NHS Commissioning Support Units
- Independent Contractors such as dentists, opticians, pharmacists
- Private Sector Providers
- Voluntary Sector Providers
- Ambulance Trusts
- Clinical Commissioning Groups
- Social Care Services
- Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC)
- Local Authorities
- Education Services
- Fire and Rescue Services
- Police & Judicial Services
- Voluntary Sector Providers
- Private Sector Providers
- Other ‘data processors’ which you will be informed of
You will be informed who your data will be shared with and in some cases asked for explicit consent for this happen when this is required.
We may also use external companies to process personal information, such as for archiving purposes. These companies are bound by contractual agreements to ensure information is kept confidential and secure.
We use a facility called GP Connect to support your direct care. GP Connect makes patient information available to all appropriate clinicians when and where they need it, to support direct patients care, leading to improvements in both care and outcomes.
GP Connect is not used for any purpose other than direct care.
Authorised Clinicians such as GPs, NHS 111 Clinicians, Care Home Nurses (if you are in a Care Home), Secondary Care Trusts, Social Care Clinicians are able to access the GP records of the patients they are treating via a secure NHS Digital service called GP connect.
The NHS 111 service (and other services determined locally e.g. Other GP practices in a Primary Care Network) will be able to book appointments for patients at GP practices and other local services.
Legal basis for sharing this data
In order for your Personal Data to be shared or processed, an appropriate “legal basis” needs to be in place and recorded. The legal bases for direct care via GP Connect is the same as the legal bases for the care you would receive from your own GP, or another healthcare provider:
- for the processing of personal data: Article 6.1 (e) of the UK GDPR: “processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller”.
- for the processing of “Special Category Data” (which includes your medical information): Article 9.2 (h) of the UK GDPR: “processing is necessary for the purposes of preventive or occupational medicine, for the assessment of the working capacity of the employee, medical diagnosis, the provision of health or social care or treatment or the management of health or social care systems and services”.
Your rights
Because the legal bases used for your care using GP Connect are the same as used in other direct care situations, the legal rights you have over this data under UK GDPR will also be the same- these are listed elsewhere in our privacy notice.
ACR project for patients with diabetes (and/or other conditions)
The data is being processed for the purpose of delivery of a programme, sponsored by NHS Digital, to monitor urine for indications of chronic kidney disease (CKD) which is recommended to be undertaken annually for patients at risk of chronic kidney disease e.g., patients living with diabetes. The programme enables patients to test their kidney function from home. We will share your contact details with Healthy.io to enable them to contact you and send you a test kit. This will help identify patients at risk of kidney disease and help us agree any early interventions that can be put in place for the benefit of your care. Healthy.io will only use your data for the purposes of delivering their service to you. If you do not wish to receive a home test kit from Healthy.io we will continue to manage your care within the Practice. Healthy.io are required to hold data we send them in line with retention periods outlined in the Records Management code of Practice for Health and Social Care. Further information about this is available at: lp.healthy.io/minuteful_info.
Arnolds Field Residents Health Risk Assessment
There have been fires at a former landfill site in Rainham for a number of years. They were particularly frequent and intense over the hot and dry summer last year sparking concerted and continuing public concern focused on possible harm to health. In the absence of robust evidence, anecdotal reports have led to a widespread belief that there has been and continues to be significant harm to health.
Purpose
Robust evidence is needed to either justify action by the Havering London Borough Council (‘the Council’) with the aim of mitigating a proven risk - which will entail considerable financial expense and officer time or to reassure residents that the threat to health is similar to that posed by air pollution across the borough as a whole.
How is the processing of information necessary to the work?
To do this the Havering London Borough Council plans to analyse the correlation between presentations for health care with respiratory symptoms and those living closet to the fire. Essentially, the Council is looking at whether there is an increase of service use during and after fires, especially amongst vulnerable groups, such as people with existing health conditions and in areas closest to and downwind of the fire.
Based on the findings, the Council will develop an action plan and intervene as necessary in order to mitigate the impact of the fire on residents’ health.
Barts Health Lung Cancer Screening Programme using Artificial Intelligence
Introduction
The existing screening process for lung cancer relies heavily on the intuition of the GP to recognise symptom presentations as being consistent with lung cancer to progress a patient down the clinical pathway. Given the number of patients seen by GPs each year, the likelihood of patients being missed is high. Additionally, screening programs, in the UK, for asymptomatic patients are limited due to cost, and therefore have narrow inclusion criteria, meaning non-smokers rarely tip over any of the current risk thresholds and patients over the age of 75 are not included due to the viability of successful treatment.
Use Case – Purpose
The overarching aim of the study is to develop a model/criteria to prompt GPs, “have you considered lung cancer? Then to suggest arranging a chest x-ray.” Additionally, to improve granularity, to estimate how progressed the cancer may be among positive cases. Therefore, the objectives of this study are two-fold:
- To develop a diagnostic criteria/model for early-stage lung cancer using the biopsychosocial factors extracted from the medical records of patients upon presentation to their GP.
- To develop a prognostic criteria/model for lung cancer outcomes using the biopsychosocial factors extracted from the medical records of patients upon presentation to their GP.
How is the processing of information necessary to the work?
To date we have been working solely with data held in secondary care, however, this approach is limited given that the majority of encounters prior to being referred on to a cancer diagnostic pathway occur at the GP level. Therefore, to adequately meet the objectives of this work, we require access to primary care GP data.
Physical Health Check for Patients with Serious Mental Illness – NELFT and ELFT
Use Case
The purpose is to enable secondary care mental health staff (in NELFT, and ELFT), who are involved with the physical health pathway to see physical health check information and vaccination status information for patients, who are already under their care and for this information to be presented in an easy-to-use listed table format. This information will enable staff, who are involved in a patient’s physical health care to quickly identify patients, who have incomplete physical health checks and complete missing health checks if patient’s consent. It will also enable practitioners to offer advice and support around vaccinations for patients, who are unvaccinated but have not refused a vaccination. This will in turn, ensure that, in line with recent NHSE London Region directives health services ‘make every contact count for people with SMI’ (NHS London Executive Director of Performance, Dec 2021).
How is the processing of information necessary to the work?
At present, secondary care staff involved in physical health can access primary care data for patients under their care and many already have EMIS licenses to do this.
However, most people in secondary care are not on SMI QOF and do not have annual health check requirements and there is no effective and efficient way for secondary care staff, to identify which people are on the SMI QOF register and whether they have physical health checks missing. Instead, clinicians need to search EMIS for individual each individual patient record using an EMIS login code or book an appointment on EMIS via the GP practice. As this exercise is time consuming the opportunity to conduct physical health checks in secondary care for patients, who have not completed their annual physical health check is frequently missed. Furthermore, there is also, at present, no means of identifying high risk patients such as those who have not had their blood tests completed for over 12 months.
Outcomes.
- Our proposed data transfer process will provide secondary care clinicians involved in a patient’s physical health care with timely (monthly) information on
- which patients are on SMI QOF and require and annual physical health check
- when physical health checks and vaccinations have been completed.
- By making every contact count this will support an increase in the number of physical health checks for people on the SMI register and contribute to the early identification of physical health problems and more timely physical health interventions and patient lifestyle changes. This will help reduce the mortality gap of 10-15 years that currently exists between people on the SMI QOF register and the general population.
- The data transfer will also allow us to risk stratify patients so that those in most urgent need of a physical health check can be prioritized.
Access to personal information
You have a right under the Data Protection Act to request access to view or to obtain copies of what information the surgery holds about you and to have it amended should it be inaccurate. In order to request this, you need to do the following:
- Your request must be made in writing to the GP – for information from the hospital you should write direct to them
- There may be a charge to have a printed copy of the information held about you
- We are required to respond to you within 30 days
- You will need to give adequate information (for example full name, address, date of birth, NHS number and details of your request) so that your identity can be verified and your records located
Objections / Complaints
Should you have any concerns about how your information is managed at the GP, please contact the GP Practice Manager. If you are still unhappy following a review by the GP practice, you can then complain to the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) via their website (www.ico.gov.uk).
If you are happy for your data to be extracted and used for the purposes described in this privacy notice then you do not need to do anything. If you have any concerns about how your data is shared then please contact the practice.
Change of Details
It is important that you tell the person treating you if any of your details such as your name or address have changed or if any of your details such as date of birth is incorrect in order for this to be amended. You have a responsibility to inform us of any changes so our records are accurate and up to date for you.
Notification
The Data Protection Act requires organisations to register a notification with the Information Commissioner to describe the purposes for which they process personal and sensitive information.
This information is publicly available on the Information Commissioners Office website www.ico.org.uk
The practice is registered with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO).
Who is the Data Controller?
The Data Controller is responsible for keeping your information secure and confidential.