The sensitivity of patient information is well-understood within the NHS. As a patient of this practice, your medical records are confidential, and are accessible only to the members of the Primary Health Care Team involved in your care. All our staff are trained to respect their duty of confidentiality to you, and have this written into their Contracts of Employment. We keep paper and electronic records securely to prevent unauthorised access or misuse. Whenever practicable we remove references to personal details such as your name and address, and often restrict this further to reduce the chances of anyone identifying a record as relating to you.

The staff at this practice record information about you and your health so you can receive the right care and treatment. We record this information, together with the details of the care you receive, so that it is available each time we see you.

The information recorded about you may be used for other reasons other than your personal care, for example ,to help to protect the health of the general public, to plan for the future and to train staff and to carry out medical and other health research.

We are involved in research studies which require access to anonymous information from patient notes. You cannot be identified from these notes as all personal details( name, address, post code, full date of birth) are removed. Individual patient’s records are added into a much larger anonymous database from patients across the UK which is used by researchers outside this practice. This data may be linked to other data, such as hospital data.

If you would like to opt out of this data collection scheme, please let your doctor know and your records will not be collected for use in the anonymous research database. This will not affect your care in any way.

If anything to do with the research would require that you provide additional information about yourself, you will be contacted by your GP to see if you are willing to take part: you will not be identified in any published results.

You have the right of access to your health records. If at anytime you would like to know more or have any concerns about how we use your information, please ask reception for more details.