Clayhall Dental Care complies with the 1998 Data Protection Act and this policy describes our procedures for ensuring that personal information about patients is processed fairly and lawfully.

What personal data do we hold?

To provide you with a high standard of dental care and attention, we need to hold personal information about you.  This personal data includes:

• Your past and current medical and dental condition: personal details such as your age, national insurance number/NHS number, address, telephone number and your general medical practitioner
• Radiographs, clinical photographs and study models
• Information about the treatment that we have provided or propose to provide and its costs
• Notes of conversations/incidents about your care, for which a record needs to be kept.
• Records of consent of treatment
• Correspondence relating to you with other health care professionals, for example the hospital or community services.

Why do we hold information about you?

We need to keep comprehensive and accurate personal data about our patients in order to provide the with safe and appropriate dental care.

For some people we also need to process personal data about you in order to provide care under NHS arrangements and to ensure the proper management and administration of the NHS.

How we process the data

We will process personal data that we hold about you in the following way:

• Retaining information
  We will retain your dental records while you are a practice patient and after you ease to be a patient, for at least 11 years or for children until age 24, whichever is the longer.
• Security of Information
  Personal data about you is held in the practice’s computer system and/or in a manual filing system. The information is not accessible to the public; only authorised members of staff have access to it.  Our computer system has secure audit trails and we back up information daily.

Disclosure of information

To provide proper and safe dental care, we may need to disclose personal information about you to:

• Your general medical practitioner
• The hospital or community dental services
• Other health professionals caring for you
• NHS payment authorities
• The Benefits Agency, where you are claiming exemption or remission from NHS charges
• Private dental schemes of which you are a member

Disclosure will take place on a ‘need-to-know’ basis, so that only those individuals/organisations who need to know in order to provide care to you and for the proper administration of Government (whose personnel are covered by strict confidentiality rules) will be given the information.  Only that information that the recipient needs to know will be disclosed.

In very limited circumstances or when required by law or a court order, personal data may have to be disclosed to a third party not connect with your health care.  In all other situations, disclosure that is not covered by this Code of Practice will only occur when we have your specific consent.  Where possible you will be informed of these requests for disclosure.

Access

You have the right of access to the data that we hold about you and to receive a copy.  Access may be obtained by making a request in writing and the payment of a fee for access of £10 (for records held on computer radiographs).  We will provide a copy of the record within 40 days of receipt of the request and an explanation of your record should you require it.

If you do not agree

If you do not wish personal data that we hold about you to be disclosed or used in the way that is described in this policy, please discuss the matter with your dentist.  You have the right to object, but this may affect our ability to provide you with dental care.