General Data Protection Regulation
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new law that determines how your personal data is processed and kept safe, and the legal rights that you have in relation to your own data.
This new regulation was applied from May 25th 2018.
Key Principles
- Data must be processed lawfully, fairly and transparently
- It must be collected for a specific, explicit and legitimate purpose
- It must be limited to what is necessary for the purposes for which it is processed
- Information must be accurate and kept up to date
- Data must be held securely
- It can only be retained for as long as necessary for the reasons that it was collected.
There are also stronger rights for patients regarding the information that the Practice holds about them. These include:
- Being informed about how their data is used
- Patients to have access to their own data
- Patients can ask to have incorrect information changed
- Restrict how their data is used
- Move their patient data from one health organisation to another
- The right to object to their patient information being processed (in certain circumstances).
What is GDPR?
GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulations and is a piece of legislation that will supersede the Data Protection Act. It will not only apply to the UK and EU; it covers anywhere in the world in which data about EU citizens is processed.
The GDPR is similar to the Data Protection Act (DPA) 1998 (which the practice already complies with), but strengthens many of the DPA’s principles. The main changes are:
- Practices must comply with subject access requests
- Where we need your consent to process data, this consent must be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous
- There are new, special protections for patient data
- The Information Commissioner’s Office must be notified within 72 hours of a data breach
- Higher fines for data breaches – up to 20 million euros
What is ‘patient data’?
Patient data is information that relates to a single person, such as his/her diagnosis, name, age, earlier medical history etc.
What is consent?
Consent is permission from a patient – an individual’s consent is defined as “any freely given specific and informed indication of his wishes by which the data subject signifies his agreement to personal data relating to him being processed.”
The changes in GDPR mean that we must get explicit permission from patients when using their data. This is to protect your right to privacy, and we may ask you to provide consent to do certain things, like contact you or record certain information about you for your clinical records.
Individuals also have the right to withdraw their consent at any time.
Privacy Notices
Download our Privacy Notice (DOCX, 125KB)
Download our COVID-19 Privacy Notice (DOCX, 10KB)
Download the fair processing policy from NICS (our local ICS) (PDF, 252KB)
Accurx specific privacy policy statement
We use a third-party provider, Accurx Limited (“Accurx”), to provide the secure technology we use to deliver online and video consulting services to patients. You may see references to Accurx on our website or as part of communications with us. Accurx are subject to contractual obligations of confidentiality and may only process personal data in accordance with our instructions.
As part of online consultations, particularly if you share images with us, you may be asked for your consent. The consent requested when collecting images is designed to ensure that patients are fully informed about how images they provide will be used and supports the common law duty of confidentiality. Health and care professionals do not rely on this consent as the lawful basis for processing images under the UK GDPR. Health and care staff rely upon public task/official authority (Article 6 1 e of GDPR) and provision of care and treatment to an individual (Article 9 2 h of GDPR) as the primary basis for using and processing personal information, including photographs and images, when providing direct care to patients.