Your privacy matters
Privacy and Confidentiality
Collection of information
Our practice will need to collect personal information as a provision of clinical services to a patient at our practice. Collected personal information will include:
- Names, addresses and contact details
- Medicare number (where available)
- Medical information including medical history,
Our practice holds all personal information securely, whether in electronic format, in protected information systems or in hard copy format in a secured environment.
Use and disclosure of information
Information is called “personal health information” if it concerns your health, medical history or past or future medical care and if someone reading it would be able to identify you.
This practice follows the guidelines of the “Handbook for the Management of Health Information in Private Medical Practice”. The Handbook was produced by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and the Committee of Presidents of Medical Colleges with the support of the General Practice Computing Group. The Handbook incorporates the provisions of Federal and State Privacy Legislation.
Collection of personal health information
Your personal health information may be collected and used for the following reasons:
• to allow our healthcare team to provide you with high quality care – to properly assess, diagnose, treat and be proactive in your healthcare needs for communicating relevant information with other treating health professionals for billing purposes, including compliance with Medicare and Health Insurance Commission requirements
•to aid in teaching, quality improvement and research, in order to improve individual, practice, and community healthcare
• to comply with any legislative or regulatory requirements e.g. notifiable diseases
• for National/State registers e.g. immunisation data
• for State reminder systems e.g. pap smear reminders or familial cancer registries
If you are uncertain as to why information is being requested, please ask your doctor.
Security of information held in the practice
Your personal health information is kept private and secure at all times. Access to your medical records is available only to authorised GPs and other members of our healthcare team, all of whom have signed confidentiality agreements. Our computers and medical records software require password access, whilst any paper records are stored in locked cupboards.
Your personal health information is not disclosed to your family, friends, or others without your consent. This information includes your medical details as well as demographic and accounts data held at our practice.
Providing your information to others involved in your healthcare
In our practice, it is customary for all our doctors and others in our practice team to have access to all the medical records. This includes our practice nurses, allied health, students, and nursing students, all of whom are bound by the rules of confidentiality. If you have any concerns about others in the practice team being able to see your records, please discuss these concerns with your doctor.
It is important that other people involved in your care outside of this practice, such as other doctors a health professionals, are informed of relevant parts of your medical history to inform best care options for you. Your doctor will let you know before this occurs. If you have any concerns about this, please discuss them with your doctor.
Providing your information to third parties
Your doctor will not disclose your personal health information to a third party unless:
• you have consented to the disclosure
• this disclosure is necessary because you are at risk of harm without treatment and you are unable to give consent – for example you might be unconscious after an accident; or your doctor is legally obliged to disclose the information (e.g. notification of certain infectious diseases or suspected child abuse, or a subpoena or court order); or
• the information is necessary to obtain Medicare payments or other health insurance rebates; or
• there is an overriding public health and safety interest in the release of the information.
There are times when disclosure is necessary for the doctors in the practice to carry out a review of their practice for the purpose of improving the quality of care provided and the activity has been approved under Commonwealth or State legislation. This provides safeguards to protect the confidentiality of the information provided.
In any of the above cases only information which is necessary to achieve the objective will be provided.
Using health information for quality improvement, professional development and research We use patient health information to assist in improving the quality of care we give to all our patients by reviewing the treatments used in the practice.
We may also use information that does not identify you in research projects to improve health care in the community. You will normally be informed if your information is to be used for this purpose and will have the opportunity to refuse to have your unidentified information used in this way.
Wherever practicable, the information used for research will not be in a form that would enable you to be identified. The publication of research results which use your information will never be in a form that enables you to be identified.
In some circumstances, where the research serves an important public interest, identifiable medical records can be used for medical research without your consent under guidelines issued by the National Health and Medical Research Council. This research must be approved by an official ethics committee.
Your access to your health information
You have access to the information contained in your medical record. You may ask your doctor about any aspect of your health care including information in your record, ive beheve that snoring information is important for good communication between you and your sons. and for eous health care.
Information in your record can be provided to you by way of an accurate and up to date summary of your care, for instance if you are moving away and are transferring to a new doctor. Do not hesitate to ask your doctor if you want a summary of your care for any reason. If you request a summary or direct access to your full medical record, your doctor will need to consider the risk of any physical or mental harm to you or any other person which may result from disclosure of your health information, and may need to remove any information that may impact on the privacy of other individuals,
Your doctor will be pleased to provide a full explanation of the health summary or medical record provided. Depending on what is involved, you may be asked to contribute to the reasonable cost of providing the information.
Retention of health records
Our practice refers to State or Territory and/or Federal legislation regarding the length of time patient health records must be kept. At a minimum, patient health records must be kept until the patient is 25 years of age, if a child, or a minimum of 7 years following the last year of the patients attendance, whichever is greater. Records must be kept for this period even if the patient has deceased.
When authorised, our practice destroys material containing patient health information by shredding (in the case of paper records), and via the radiology provider (in the case of radiology films).
Resolving your concerns regarding the privacy of your health information
If you have any concerns regarding the privacy of your health information or regarding the accuracy of the information held by the practice, you should discuss these with your doctor. Inaccurate information will be corrected or your concerns noted in the records. For legal reasons, the original notes will be retained.
Further information on Privacy Legislation is available from:
Office of the Australian Information Commissioner
Ph: 1300 363 992
Fax: 02 9284 9666
Email: enquiries@oaic.gov.au
Information and Privacy Commission NSW
Ph: 1800 472 679
Email: ipcinfo@ipc.nsw.gov.au
To assist in providing a safe physical environment, a closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance system has been installed in the practice. The area covered includes the reception desk, waiting areas, and carpark.