Confidentiality – Protecting Your Medical Record and Privacy
Marple Cottage Surgery is committed to safeguarding the confidentiality of personal information by ensuring it follows its legal obligations for data protection, information sharing, disclosures of personal confidential data and subject access rights
To provide clinical care for you we will collect and store information such as personal details, including name, address, your medical consultations, treatment and medications, test results, X-rays, telephone calls, letters received from hospital etc. Without his information we cannot provide safe clinical care.
We have a legal duty to explain to our patients how we use any personal information we collect about you, whether records electronically or in paper format. Information sharing must be consistent with the interests of the patient and / or staff.
For further details of sharing of information please refer to our Privacy Notice here
How we will use your information
The information we record helps us provide safe and effective clinical care for you, and we call this data used for providing direct patient care. We can only disclose your data to another party if you give consent, or to enable another organisation / provider to provide direct clinical care eg if we refer you to hospital.
In some situations we can disclose this information if it is required by law or if it is justified in the public interest eg to prevent infectious diseases from spreading
In some circumstances we will also share medical records for medical research, for example to find out more about why people get ill.
Your rights
- You have the right to be given a copy of your medical record.
- You have the right to object to your medical records being shared with other organisations (please refer to the Data Sharing & Opt Out section)
- You have the right to object to your information being used for medical research and to plan health services.
- You have the right to have any mistakes corrected and to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office. Please see the practice privacy notice on the website or speak to a member of staff for more information.
In order to comply with our legal and contractural obligations the practice may send data to NHS Digital when directed by the Secretary of State for Health under the Health and Social Care Act 2012.
GDPR
The practice complies with data protection and access to medical records following General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).
We will only share identifiable information to provide further medical treatment for you e.g. from district nurses and hospital services, etc., unless you consent to sharing with other organisations.
Processing your information in this way and obtaining your consent ensures that we comply with Articles 6(1)(c), 6(1)(e) and 9(2)(h) of the General Date Protection Regulations (GDPR).
We may also have to share your information, subject to strict agreements on how it will be used, with the following organisations or receive information from the following organisations:-
- Out of hours providers
- NHS Trusts / Foundation Trusts
- Independent Contractors e.g. dentists, opticians, pharmacists
- Private Sector Providers
- Ambulance Trusts
- Social Care Services
- Local Authorities
- Fire and Rescue Services
- Other ‘data processors’ which you will be informed of via our Privacy Notice
If you do not wish information about you to be used in such a way, please refer to the Access to Medical Records section on the website here
