Your Health Care Record
Your doctor and other health professionals caring for you (e.g. nurse or physiotherapist) keep records about your health and treatment so they are able to provide you with the best possible care.
These records are called your ‘Health Care Record’.
Your Health Care Record may be stored in paper form or on computer databases, and may include information such as:
- Your name, address and date of birth
- Details of your next of kin or named emergency contact
- Details of your hospital appointments
- Notes about your health and any treatments and/or procedures you have undergone
- Test results – e.g. laboratory and X-ray results
How your Health Care Record is used to help you
Your Health Care Record is used to ensure that:
- Health care professionals looking after you have accurate and up-to-date information about you, to help them assess and decide on any future care you may require.
- We are able to assess how well you have been looked after
- Your concerns can be properly investigated should you make a complaint
How your Health Care Record is used to help the NHS
Health Care Records are used to assist with:
- Looking after the health of the general public – e.g. notifying central NHS groups of outbreaks of infectious diseases
- Reporting events to the appropriate authorities when we are required to do so by law – e.g. notification of births
- Paying your GP or hospital for the care you have received
- The audit of NHS accounts and clinical audit of the quality of services provided
- Reporting and investigation of complaints, claims and untoward incidents
- Service planning to ensure we meet the needs of our population in the future
- Preparing statistics on our performance for the Department of Health
- Reviewing our care to ensure that it is of the highest standard
- Teaching and training health care professionals
- Conducting health research and development
- Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust is a research-active Trust involved in developing future treatments and care. You might be asked to take part in a research study. If you are, the researcher will explain the study in detail to you, including why it is necessary and what it will involve. If you decide that you would like to be involved, you will be asked to sign a consent form. If you do not want to take part, this will not affect your treatment in any way.
Summary Care Record (SCR)
The Summary Care Record (SCR) is a web based application and facilitates the access to patient information held on the NHS Care Records Service (NHS CRS).
For a patient to receive the best care from the NHS it is necessary for their information to be available wherever and whenever it is needed. Electronically held patient information will be accessible whenever they present for treatment anywhere in England.
The Summary Care Record is available nationally to authorised healthcare professionals and is accessed using the smartcard.
Everyone working for the NHS has a duty to keep your information confidential and secure.
However from time to time there may be a need to share some, or all, of your information with other health care professionals, NHS organisations or other qualified health care providers so that we can work together to obtain the best possible care.
We will only ever share your information if it is in the best interests for your care.
We will not disclose any information that identifies you to anyone outside your care team without your express permission, unless we are required to do so by law or in the best interests of your continuing care.
Data protection legislation embraces the right of access (commonly referred to as subject access) and gives you the right to obtain a copy of your personal data including the information contained in your Health Care Record. Each NHS organisation holds their own records and we can only supply records about your care at our hospitals.
Children can also exercise their data protection rights. Even if a child is too young to understand the implications of subject access rights, it is still the right of the child rather than of anyone else such as a parent or guardian. So it is the child who has a right of access to the information held about them, even though in the case of young children these rights are likely to be exercised by those with parental responsibility for them. Before responding to a subject access request for information held about a child, we will consider if they are mature enough to understand their rights or that it is evident that it is in the best interests of the child for someone else to exercise the child’s rights.
If you would like view your records or obtain a copy of them you may submit your request in writing or verbally. To help us process your request faster, please include your name and address for correspondence and describe the information that you are requesting, giving us enough details about the information to allow us to correctly identify and locate it. You will also need to provide proof of identity.
We must act on a subject access request without undue delay and at the latest within one month of receipt.
Your family and friends are not allowed to ask to see your records without your written consent.
You should be aware that in certain circumstances your right to see some details in your health care record may be limited in your own best interests.
You have a right to request that any inaccuracies be corrected or annotated.
Submitting a request for access to your health records
A request does need to be in a particular format but the Trust has produced a Subject Access Form (word version/pdf version) that may assist you to provide the information that we need to deal with your request.
Requests in writing should be sent to:
Information Governance Office
Princess Royal Hospital
Downsmere
Lewes Road
Haywards Heath
West Sussex
RH16 4EX
Email: bsuh.subject.access@nhs.net
Telephone: 01444 441881
Extension: 5620 / 4186 / 8013
- By law, everyone working for or on behalf of the NHS or other qualified health care providers must respect your confidentiality and keep your information secure.
- We reassure you that the computer systems we use are subject to strict access controls and only staff who are involved in your care will have access to your records.
- We will always obtain your consent before sharing your information with other health professionals unless exempted by law.
- When we do share your information we will always endeavour to use the most secure method available where possible
We use patient information in lots of different ways to ensure the best treatment for our service users.
To ensure each new regular use of information is legal, we undertake a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA), which is a risk assessment recommended by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which is the regulator of the Data Protection Act 2018. These assessments are processed by the Trust’s Information Governance Team and approved by the Caldicott Guardian.
To make sure we are being transparent with our patients about what we are doing with their information, we regularly publish and update our most recent list of approved DPIAs.
View our website terms and conditions to see how we use information about your visit to this site.
Visit the Information Commissioner’s Office website
If you have any concerns over the use of your medical information, please discuss these with your health professional during your next hospital visit.
Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust is a data controller under the Data Protection Act 1998. We collect and keep information about you in order to give you the best possible care.
We keep your information on paper and on computer. We keep your information secure and by law you are entitled to ask to see a copy
By law:
- Everyone working in the NHS and social services must keep your information confidential
- Everyone must keep your information secure
- We will only share your information with consent or as the law permits
We may use information about you to:
- Make sure your care is of the highest standard
- Plan future services
- Investigate complaints; claims and untoward incidents
- Check how well we are performing against government targets
- Help train staff and support research
- Fund your care
Contact
For more information, please contact the Information Governance Team at Princess Royal Hospital on 01444 441881 ext 517
