Confidentiality

Under the Data Protection Act 1998, you have a right to know who holds personal information about you. This person or organisation is called the data controller. In the NHS, the data controller is usually your local NHS Trust and your GP surgery. The NHS must keep your personal health information confidential; it is your right.

Please be aware that our staff are bound to the NHS code of confidentiality. Our staff are therefore not permitted to discuss any of our patient’s medical history, including their registration status, without their written consent to do so.

Once we have received their written consent and verified this with the patient, we can then we can provide you with this information. This includes complaining on behalf of a patient, but excludes patients who are unable to act on their own behalf and already have a designated person or carer responsible for their medical care.

We therefore respectfully ask parents and guardians not to request information regarding their relatives, or to complain on their behalf, unless we have their written consent to do so.

Chaperones

Please note, we are very happy to provide a chaperone to accompany patients in any consultation at the surgery.

Please inform us when requesting an appointment to arrange for a chaperone to be present at your consultation or mention to the clinician at the start of your consultation that you would like a chaperone to be present.

Care Navigation

When making requests, we ask for a brief outline of your problem when you contact to request an appointment.

This is because we have introduced something called ‘care navigation’. It means we are training receptionists and clerical staff to help them help patients by identifying the most appropriate place for their care.

Through this specialist training, our practice team will be able to direct you to the most appropriate health clinician for your needs first.

Receptionists will never offer clinical advice or triage. This new way of working is about offering you the choice to see more appropriate professionals in the practice team or even somewhere else. If they can deal with the problem directly, it will often be quicker and means you may not need to see the GP at all.

By working this way, it helps free up time for GPs to care for patients with complex or serious health conditions that can only be managed by the GP. More importantly though, it means people are seen first by the clinician that is best placed to manage their clinical problem.

Reception staff (care navigators) might suggest other professionals that can help, such as:

Self referrals
Pharmacies
Nurse/Nurse practitioner
Support groups
Family services

The choice is always yours though and you will never be refused an appointment but we hope next time you contact the surgery you will see the value of seeing another health care professional if they are able to help.

If you would like someone to explain this to you in person, a member of our practice team will be happy to help.

Access to Information

Confidential patient data will be shared within the practice healthcare team and with other healthcare professionals to whom you are referred for care. Your data may be used by those clinical teams providing your care, for the essential purpose of clinical audit. Confidential patient data may also be required for the broader purposes of public health and audit, research, the provision of health care services, teaching and training. Data disclosed will be kept to the minimum required to serve the purpose and, if possible, will be anonymised before disclosure.

Confidential and identifiable patient information will not be disclosed without explicit consent, unless:

It is a matter of life and death, or serious harm to you or another individual
It is overwhelmingly in the public interest to do so
There is a legal obligation to do so.

In all of these circumstances, the minimum identifiable information that is essential to serve the purpose may be revealed to someone with a legal entitlement to access the data for that purpose.

All individuals with access to your data have a professional and/or contractual duty of confidentiality. If you are concerned about any of the ways in which your confidential data may be used, further information is available from the practice manager.

You are entitled to register an objection, which will be respected if this is possible.

Care Quality Commission

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) makes sure hospitals, care homes, dental and GP surgeries, and all other care services in England provide people with safe, effective, compassionate and high-quality care, and encourages them to make improvements where possible.

They do this by inspecting services and publishing the results on their website: www.cqc.org.uk

You can use the results to help you make better decisions about the care you, or someone you care for, receives.

Our CQC Inspection

Our practice is inspected by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to ensure we are meeting essential standards of quality and safety.

This widget provides a summary of the results of the latest checks carried out by the CQC.