Practice Policies

The practice complies with data protection and access to medical records legislation. Identifiable information about you will be shared with others in the following circumstances:

• To provide further medical treatment for you e.g. from district nurses and hospital services.
• To help you get other services e.g. from the social work department. This requires your consent.
• When we have a duty to others e.g. in child protection cases.
• Anonymised patient information will also be used at local and national level to help the Health Board and Government plan services e.g. for diabetic care.

If you do not wish anonymous information about you to be used in such a way, please let us know.

Reception and administration staff require access to your medical records in order to do their jobs. These members of staff are bound by the same rules of confidentiality as the medical staff.

It is NHS policy to treat all patients and employees fairly and equally regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, marital status, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion, age or disability.

Equality is based on the legal obligation to comply with anti-discrimination legislation. Equality protects people from being discriminated against on the grounds of group membership i.e. sex, race disability, sexual orientation, belief, or age.

Diversity implies a wide range of conditions and characteristics. Diversity encompasses visible and non-visible individual differences. It can be seen in the makeup of patients and the workforce in terms of gender, ethnic minorities, disabled people etc.

Information about the general practitioners and the practice required for disclosure under this act can be made available to the public. All requests for such information should be made to the practice manager.

• Freedom of Information Act 2000

Contractual requirements came into force from 1^st April 2014 requiring that GP practices should make available a statement of intent in relation to the following IT developments:

• Referral management
• Electronic appointment booking
• On line booking of repeat prescriptions
• Summary care record
• GP2GP transfers
• Patient access to records

Please find below details of the practice stance with regards to these developments:-

Referral management

All practices must include the NHS number as the primary identifier in all NHS clinical correspondence issued by the practice.

This is our current practice, all NHS clinical correspondence issued by the Practice includes the NHS number.

Electronic appointment booking

Practices are required to promote and offer the facility for all patients, who wish to, to book, view, amend, cancel and print appointments online.

We currently offer the facility for booking appointments online, please speak to reception for more information or to sign up for this service. It is our intention to have the facility to cancel appointments online available to patients by 31st March 2015.

Online booking of repeat prescriptions

Practices are required to promote and offer the facility for all patients, who wish to, to order online, view and print a list of their repeat prescriptions for necessary drugs, medicines or appliances.

We currently offer the facility for ordering repeat prescriptions online, please speak to reception for more information.

Interoperable records/Summary Care Record

Practices are required to enable successful automated uploads of any changes to a patient’s summary information, at least on a daily basis to the Summary Care record.

Having your Summary Care Record available will help anyone treating you without your full medical record. They will have access to information about any medication you may be taking and any drugs that you have a recorded allergy or sensitivity to.

Emmer Green Surgery if already live with Summary Care Records, there is more information available on this website. However, if you do not want your medical records to be available in this way then you will need to let us know so that we can update your record. You can do this via the ‘opt out’ form available on this website.

GP2GP record transfers

There is a contractual requirement to utilise the GP2GP facility for the transfer of patient records between practices, when a patient registers or de-registers.

It is very important that you are registered with a doctor at all times. If you leave your GP and register with a new GP, your medical records will be removed from your previous doctor and forwarded on to your new GP via NHS England. It can take several weeks for your paper records to reach your new surgery. With GP to GP record transfers, your electronic record is transferred to your new practice much sooner.

Emmer Green Surgery confirm that GP2GP transfers are already active and we send and receive patient records via this system.

Patient access to their GP record

Practices are required to promote and offer the facility for patients to view online, export or print any summary of information from their records relating to medications, allergies, adverse reactions and any other items/date such as ‘additional’ record elements which has been agreed between the contractor and the patient.

Your local health and care services are working more closely together to provide a joined-up service to meet your needs.

Working together improves the quality of care because the clinicians and other professionals involved in your treatment and care provision have better, more timely and more complete information on which to base their decisions.

The local shared care record reduces the need for you to repeat your story in each different setting, thereby saving you time and frustration.  It also makes the services themselves more efficient by enabling health and care professionals involved in your care to view the relevant records as and when appropriate.

The Health and Social Care Act 2012 places a legal requirement on health and social care organisations to share data with other health and social care organisations involved in your care or likely to be involved in your care.

There are also occasions where we have a legal duty to pass patient information to external organisations such as NHS Digital and NHS England that either provide national shared care records such as the NHS Summary Care Record or that have a responsibility to oversee and address issues relating to the management of the NHS as a whole.

In addition, your data is also used in an anonymised form to manage the quality of the services you receive and to help monitor, manage and improve the provision of health and social care nationally and locally.

Together, the UK Data Protection Act 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation and our Common Law duties set out the rules we need to comply with when processing and sharing your data and we and our local partners have policies and procedures in place to ensure we comply.

As an example, one such policy is a requirement for staff to be trained and tested regularly with respect to data protection and privacy.

The local shared care record

Local shared care records are used by the practice to share some key information from your records with other organisations and health and social care professionals who may be involved in your care.

Role based access controls are implemented within the local shared care record systems and these controls make certain that only those roles that have a legitimate reason to access your data can do so. In addition to the technical access controls, all organisations that have been granted access to the local shared care records have committed to perform regular audits to ensure that the controls are properly applied.

The various types of organisation that may be required to view relevant aspects of your data using the local shared care record include:

• NHS Trusts, including:
  • Hospitals
  • Community healthcare services (when you have been referred to them)
  • Emergency services
  • Mental health services (when you have been referred to them)
  • Specialist service providers (when you have been referred to them); and
• Local authorities;
• Voluntary sector organisations (when you have agreed to be referred to them).
• Independent sector health care providers (when you have been referred to them);
• Independent sector social care providers (when you have been referred to them);

Practices contribute the following types of data to the local shared care record:

• Personal demographic details (e.g. address, date of birth, next of kin/emergency contact details, ethnicity, disability or language preferences);
• Allergies;
• Events and episodes of care;
• Health promotion information;
• Medication data (current and past);
• Preventative procedures;
• Problems;
• Procedures;
• Referrals;
• Relevant social and family history;
• Results from diagnostic procedures; and
• Test results.

Other health and social care organisations contribute the following types of data to your local shared care record:

• Alerts, allergies, risks and warnings;
• Admissions and discharges;
• Ambulance, NHS 111 and out of hours calls;
• Care plans;
• Carer Details;
• Diagnostic tests, imaging, results and reports;
• Electronic documents and letters;
• Next of kin; and
• Referrals, appointments and consultations.

There are three main local care records that are made available to support your care across the local health and social economy.  These are:

• Share Your Care (which is also known as Connected Care) and for some patients a similar arrangement known as CHIE (formerly the Hampshire Health Record). This local shared care record consolidates your important local data from all sources for access by authorised professionals when you need it;
• The GP clinical system used in practices and other non-hospital settings that can provide near real-time access to your GP data when you are being cared for elsewhere in the local health care economy; and
• The local pathology and diagnostic system that can provide details of your tests and diagnostic reports to authorised professionals elsewhere in the local health care economy when you need it.

Your rights

Your rights in respect of these local shared records are summarised below:

• As required by law, you have a right to request a copy of your local shared care record and.
• You also have a right to request that errors in your records are corrected.
• For some uses of your data, you also have the right to object to your data being processed.

We aim to comply with these rights at all times.

For queries and requests regarding GP clinical system shared records, please contact the practice.

For queries and requests regarding Share Your Care and local pathology and diagnostic shared records, contact fhft.information.governance@nhs.net.

For more information on anonymised data processing please see the NHS Website: Your Data Matters

The NHS operates 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. 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.