We hold a combination of personal contact and medical information on patients.
Contact information includes the following:
Full name and date of birth
Contact address
Email and telephone numbers
Occupation
Other information relevant to any enquiry submitted via our website
Medical information may be a combination of relevant details provided by a referring GP or consultant, clinical notes compiled by practitioner, and information collected directly from the patient through our consent form and subsequent consultations.
We do not collect or store any bank or credit card details at any time.
The information held is exclusively for the purpose of communicating with and managing the treatment of our patients, and therefore in the legitimate interest of providing safe and effective healthcare.
Communication information is used to arrange appointments and send reminders, and may also be used occasionally to provide more generic healthcare information, to elicit feedback to help us improve the service we provide, or to respond to any patient enquiry.
Medical information is held as part of your secure and confidential medical records to document and track treatments. This may include:
Referral documentation and background supplied by your GP or consultant
Relevant medical history and documented conditions
Assessments carried out by your therapist
Details of each treatment, with associated outcomes
As part of legislated best practice, we are obliged to hold records for a minimum of 7 years following treatment. At that point any physical information held will be securely shredded, unless relevant to ongoing treatment.
Information will only be shared with other medical professionals involved in the provision of medical care – in general your GP, consultant or private medical insurance company.
Aligned in Health will not provide data to any third parties unless we are compelled to do so by law. We will never sell data for marketing or analysis purposes.
All electronic data is held in systems requiring secure log in and with password protection. Paper based information is held within our secure clinic environment, which is alarmed outside clinical hours. Any information transferred outside of the clinic will either use secure encrypted email systems or secure tamper proof document pouches.
Under the new GDPR legislation, the individual’s rights with regard to the data held have been increased, such that you now have:
The right to be informed – you have the right to understand what type of information is held and how it is used – this privacy policy provides you with this.
The right to access – you have the right to see or have copies of your personal information. A small fee may be payable. If you would like a copy of the information held on you please write to alignedinhealth@gmail.com.
The right to request that your personal information be rectified – it is important that information we hold is correct and updated, for example, if contact details change.
The right to erasure – whilst generally GDPR allows the individual the right to have their information deleted unless there is compelling reasons not to do so, there is a general exemption with regard to healthcare information as it may be vital to the patient’s healthcare
The right to restrict processing – we do not carry out any processing on the data we hold
The right to data portability – you have the right to have a copy of your information in a useful form for potential transfer for use elsewhere. This is unlikely to be relevant in the healthcare world, but as with the right to access a small fee may be payable, and you should write to alignedinhealth@gmail.com.