Data Handling Policy
We hold various pieces of information about you including your name and address, date of birth, sex, phone numbers, email address, your registered GP, and clinical details such as the state of health of your eyes, general health and medications, any relevant family history of eye/health conditions, your spectacle and/or contact lens prescription, dispensing information, and copies of any letters we have written about you or received from other professionals, such as your doctor. You are entitled to a copy of this information although there may be an administrative charge for providing it. If you wish to see your records, please ask the manager and we will respond as quickly as possible and in any case are required to do so within 30 days. If you require independent advice, contact the Information Commissioners Office at www.ico.gov.uk
We adhere to the guidelines of the College of Optometrists and the Data Protection Act and will not pass any of your personal information to a third party without your consent unless there is a clear public interest duty to do so. You will need to provide us with your consent if you wish us to pass your information to another optometrist.
If you are an NHS patient, we are obliged to provide the portion of your record that relates to NHS services to authorised persons within the NHS (who are in turn subject to a duty of confidentiality) if they request this. This is usually to confirm that we have provided the NHS services that we have been paid for, and to improve quality of care. It is also possible that the NHS may contact you to ask if you have received services (such as a sight test or spectacles) as part of this monitoring.
Within the practice we may use the information to analyse trends, or to audit our performance. This enables us to monitor and improve the quality of care that we offer you. Wherever possible (i.e. if we do not need to know who an individual patient is) we will only analyse trends from anonymised information. If you have any queries about this please contact us and we will be happy to help.
