Confidentiality
The Staff
Our staff have all been with us for some time. When each and every one of them was employed they
were made to understand that confidentiality was the very highest priority in this practice and
that any breach, no matter how apparently unimportant, would be grounds for dismissal.
We give you our assurance that all information, be it medical or of any sort, will be dealt with by us in the strictest confidence. We take this so seriously that we will not pass on information even between family members. We believe that young persons are entitled to the same confidentiality from their own parents that their parents are from them.
Understanding privacy is of paramount importance, especially in small communities. It is a compliment that many of our patients look on us also as their friends, but it is crucial to understand that our professional duty to our patients takes precedence over any other personal relationship.
The Computer
The computer is as much a part of Family Medicine today as it is in supermarket check-outs, the
class room, and the bit that runs your washing machine programme. Wherever large amounts of
information need to be managed and searched, computers are invaluable, and in medicine they are
as useful as anywhere.
There is a computer on every desk in our surgery and they are all linked together. The computer stores short-hand details of consultations, immunisations, pathology test results, referrals, as well as is a database for our patient's contact details and demographics. Furthermore it stores details of and manages all the medications that we prescribe and dispense, right down to writing the medication labels. It is a vital tool and central to everything that we do.
Containing such a lot of highly sensitive and important information carries very high duties of confidentiality. You should be aware that we are registered with the Data Protection Act and our software and hardware are subject to the very highest standards of data protection available today. All data entries are "signed" by the unique and security cleared member of staff who is accessing the machine at the time, and can not be changed at a later date.
So that information can be transferred from hospital to practice, the computer is linked by telephone lines through the "NHS Net" which is a discrete and "Firewalled" part of the internet where data is scrambled and encoded to the most sophisticated levels of security.