Practice Policies

Doctors and staff in the practice have access to your medical records to enable them to do their jobs. From time to time information may be shared with others involved in your care if it is necessary. Anyone with access to your record is properly trained in confidentiality issues and is governed by both legal and contractual duty to keep your details private.

All information about you is held securely and appropriate safeguards are in place to prevent accidental loss.

In some circumstances we may be required by law to release your details to statutory or other official bodies, for example if a court order is presented, or in the case of public health issues. In other circumstance you may be required to give written consent before information is released – such as for medical reports for insurance, solicitors etc.

To ensure your privacy, we will not disclose information over the telephone or fax unless we are sure that we are talking to you. Information will not be disclosed to family, friends or spouses unless we have prior written consent, and we do not, leave messages with others.

You can be assured that anything you discuss with any member of the surgery staff, whether doctor, nurse or care navigators, will remain confidential. Even if you are under 16, nothing will be said to anyone, including parents, other family members, care workers or teachers, without your permission. The only reason why we might want to consider passing on confidential information without your permission would be to protect either you or someone else from serious harm. In this situation, we would always try to discuss this with you first.

If you have any worries or queries about confidentiality, please ask a member of staff.

If you would like to discuss matters of a confidential nature with our Care Navigators, we have a side room available in reception for this purpose.

1.1.3 GP Privacy Notice December 25

1.1.3 Childrens privacy notice June 26

The NHS uses information about patients (patient data) to research, plan and improve services, treatment and care patients receive.

These data come from your GP surgery, hospitals and other healthcare providers. The organisation that collects your data is called NHS England.

To help improve services, NHS England shares these data with researchers from universities and hospitals. This type of data-sharing has been happening for many years. Our practice will be sharing patient data with a research team at the University of Leeds for the 3i-o study. The North East Commissioning Service (NECS), who work with NHS England, will be taking data from patient records and linking it to data held by NHS England. It will then be anonymised before transferring the data securely to a secure area on the North East and North Cumbria Secure Data Environment for University of Leeds researchers to access. All data will be anonymised before being received by the research team, so you will not be able to be identified from the data.

All data collected and shared are protected by strict rules around privacy, confidentiality and security. Your data will never be sold or shared with insurance or marketing companies. The Health Research Authority has given Section 251 support for the activity following advice from the Confidentiality Advisory Group (reference no. 25/CAG/0042, IRAS 331542). This means our practice can disclose information to NECS without being in breach of the common law duty of confidentiality. It allows data to be shared for essential activities of the NHS and important medical research.

Study summary:

Patients often receive medicines that they do not want, do not need or that could potentially do more harm than good. This is called overprescribing. It increases the risks of side effects from medicines, hospital admissions and even deaths. Overprescribing also wastes medicines, time and money. Overprescribing is strongly linked to health inequalities, the avoidable and unfair differences in health between different groups of people.

There are many ways to reduce overprescribing. One way is to show clinicians (GPs, pharmacists and nurses) how much they prescribe compared to other clinicians. This is called audit and feedback. The feedback shows those who prescribe more than others so that they can make appropriate changes to reduce this. Most NHS prescribing (and overprescribing) happens in general practice. We have already run a feedback campaign that reduced overprescribing of addictive painkillers in general practice. We are now running a similar campaign to reduce unnecessary antibiotic prescribing. This type of feedback often works in reducing overprescribing.

However, we want to find out if it works without making it more difficult for some people to get the health care they need, making health inequalities worse. For example, people with long term conditions who struggle to access other care, or people with English as a second language who struggle to be understood by the clinicians that they see. Our team at the University of Leeds will look for connected changes in hospital attendances. This will help us to understand how changes in prescribing can make healthcare better or worse for some people.

More information on the study and research team can be found here:

https://medicinehealth.leeds.ac.uk/dir-record/research-projects/1793/impact-of-an-intervention-on-inequalities-in-overprescribing-the-3i-o-study

To opt out of your data being used in this study, please contact your practice to tell them. Ansa Nisar/Dr T Ishfaq. Horton Park Medical Practice- 01274 087646

This practice is committed to preserving, as far as is practical, the security of data used by our information systems. This means that we will take all reasonable actions to;

Maintain the Confidentiality of all data within the practice by:

• Ensuring that only authorised persons can gain access to our systems
• Not disclosing information to anyone who has no right to see it

Maintain the integrity of all data within the practice by:

• Taking care over input
• Ensuring that all changes are reported and monitored
• Checking that the correct record is on the screen before updating
• Reporting all apparent errors and ensuring that they are resolved

Maintain the availability of all data by:

• Ensuring that all equipment is protected from intruders
• Ensuring that backups are taken at regular, predetermined intervals
• Ensuring that contingency is provided for possible failure or equipment theft and that any such contingency plans are tested and kept up to date

Additionally we will take all reasonable measures to comply with our legal responsibilities under:

• The Data Protection Act (2018)
• The Health and Safety at Work Act (1992)
• The Access to Health Records Act (1990)

If you don’t want your identifiable patient data to be shared for purposes except for your own care, you can opt-out by registering a Type 1 Opt-out or a National Data Opt-out, or both. These opt-outs are different and they are explained in more detail below. Your individual care will not be affected if you opt-out using either option.

Please see this helpful video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLi9gh7RyLA

Type 1 Opt-out (opting out of NHS Digital collecting your data)

NHS Digital not collect data from GP practices about patients who have registered a Type 1 Opt-out with their practice. More information about Type 1 Opt-outs is in our GP Data for Planning and Research Transparency Notice, including a form that you can complete and send to your GP practice.

The deadline for health and care organisations to comply with national data opt-out deadline has been extended to 31 March 2022. The deadline has been extended again, to enable health and care organisations to focus their resources on the coronovirus (COVID-19) outbreak. Therefore if you do not want your data to be shared with NHS Digital please register your Type 1 Opt-out with your GP practice by 31 March 2022.

If you register a Type 1 Opt-out after this collection has started, no more of your data will be shared with us. We will however still hold the patient data which was shared with us before you registered the Type 1 Opt-out.

If you do not want NHS Digital to share your identifiable patient data with anyone else for purposes beyond your own care, then you can also register a National Data Opt-out.

National Data Opt-out (opting out of NHS Digital sharing your data)

NHS Digital collect data from GP medical records about patients who have registered a National Data Opt-out. The National Data Opt-out applies to identifiable patient data about your health, which is called confidential patient information.

NHS Digital won’t share any confidential patient information about you – this includes GP data, or other data we hold, such as hospital data – with other organisations, unless there is an exemption to this.

To find out more information and how to register a National Data Opt-Out, please read our GP Data for Planning and Research Transparency Notice.

Increasingly, patient medical data is shared e.g. between GP surgeries and District Nursing, in order to give clinicians access to the most up to date information when attending patients.

The systems we operate require that any sharing of medical information is consented to by patients beforehand. Patients must consent to sharing of the data held by a health provider out to other health providers and must also consent to which of the other providers can access their data.

For example, it may be necessary to share data held in GP practices with district nurses but the local podiatry department would not need to see it to undertake their work. In this case, patients would allow the surgery to share their data, they would allow the district nurses to access it but they would not allow access by the podiatry department. In this way access to patient data is under patients’ control and can be shared on a ‘need to know’ basis.

The following IT systems are in use at the practice:

• Referral Management (using NHS numbers in referrals)
• Electronic Appointment Booking (the facility to book routine appointments online and, similarly, to cancel appointments
• Online booking of repeat prescriptions
• Summary Care Record (uploading details of your current medication and allergies to the national “spine” so that these are available for doctors involved in your care elsewhere)
• GP to GP transfers (the electronic transfer of records from practice to practice when you re-register
• Patient Access to records (the facility to view your medical records online).

If you are not already registered for online access and would like to be please complete our online form.

If you would like access to your medical records enabled or would like to opt out of the local or national summary care record, please contact reception.

The Practice staff shall always show due respect and courtesy when dealing with patients and their representatives. We respectfully request that patients and their representatives do the same when dealing with members of the practice team.

The NHS operate a zero tolerance policy with regard to violence and abuse and the practice has the right to remove violent patients from the list with immediate effect in order to safeguard practice staff, patients and other persons.

No form of aggression (whether verbal or physical in nature) will be tolerated – any instances of such behaviour on the practice premises may result in the perpetrator being reported to the Police and removed from the practice’s List of Registered Patients.

Violence in this context includes actual or threatened physical violence or verbal abuse which leads to fear for a person’s safety. In this situation we will notify the patient in writing of their removal from the list and record in the patient’s medical records the fact of the removal and the circumstances leading to it.