Your information, privacy and the law-how we use your medical records.
The use and sharing of personal information forms an essential part of the provision of health and care, benefiting individual patients, often necessary for the effective functioning of health and social services and sometimes necessary in the public interest. Nevertheless your doctor has a strong legal and ethical duty to protect patient information and all information you share with your doctor is kept confidential.
This practice is committed to observing the laws on data protection and confidentiality concerning your medical record and all uses or sharing of your information.
We share information about you with health professionals who are involved in providing you with care and treatment i.e. District Nurses. This is on a need to know basis and normally event by event.
Some of your health information (including name, address, allergies and medications) is automatically copied to the Northern Ireland Electronic Care Record.
Some information about you is shared with the National Screening Campaigns such as Flu and Diabetic Eye Screening.
Information about you in non-identifiable form is used to manage the NHS and make payments.
Information about you in non-identifiable form is used to check the quality of care provided by the NHS.
Information about you in non-identifiable form may be used for medical research. Where identifiable information may be required we will first seek your consent.
We will share information when the law requires us to, for instance when we are inspected or reporting certain illness or safeguarding vulnerable people.
An individual is only entitled to information that relates to them, (their personal data) that the practice holds in electronic form or in a 'relevant filing system'. A relevant filing system for the purposes of data protection is if they are held in a 'sufficiently systematic structured way'.
You can ask for your personal information/medical record from the practice. We ask patients to complete consent forms giving us authority to do that or you can ask for the information verbally, however the practice is not obliged to respond to a verbal request unless it is satisfied of the person's identity. We will provide one copy of medical records without charge, and advise the individual to take their own additional copy of this information as any further requests will incur a fee (unless a request for recently updated information).