Privacy Policy
Data protection privacy notice for patients
Privacy Policy
In providing your dental care and treatment, we will ask for information about you and your health. Occasionally, we may receive information from other providers who have been involved in providing your care. This privacy notice describes the type of personal information we hold, why we hold it and what we do with it.
About us
We are Park House Dental operating at Argyle Street, Accrington, BB5 1DQ.
Shahzad Tahir is responsible for keeping secure the information about you that we hold. Those at the practice who have access to your information include dentists and other dental professionals involved with your care and treatment, and the reception staff responsible for the management and administration of the practice.
Our data protection officer, Jessica Chadwick, ensures that the practice complies with data protection requirements to ensure that we collect, use, store and dispose of your information responsibly. You can contact our data protection officer, Jessica Chadwick, by email at reception@accringtondentist.com or by phone on 01254 790900.
Information that we hold
We can only keep and use information for specific reasons set out in the law. If we want to keep and use information about your health, we can only do so in particular circumstances. Below, we describe the information we hold and why, and the lawful basis for collecting and using it.
Contact details
We hold personal information about you including your name, date of birth, national insurance number, NHS number, address, telephone number and email address. This information allows us to fulfil our contract with you to provide appointments. We will also use the information to send you reminders and recall appointments as we have a legitimate interest to ensure your continuing care and to make you aware of our services.
Dental records
We hold information about your dental and general health, including:
- Clinical records made by dentists and other dental professionals involved with your care and treatment
- X-rays, clinical photographs, digital scans of your mouth and teeth, and study models
- Medical and dental histories
- Treatment plans and consent
- Information on race and sexual orientation
- Notes of conversations with you about your care
- Dates of your appointments
- Details of any complaints you have made and how these complaints were dealt with
- orrespondence with you and other health professionals or institutions.
We collect and use this information to allow us to fulfil our contract with you to discuss your treatment options and provide dental care that meets your needs. We also use this information for the legitimate interest of ensuring the quality of the treatment we provide.
Financial information
We hold information about the fees we have charged, the amounts you have paid and some payment details. This information forms part of our contractual obligation to you to provide dental care and allows us to meet legal financial requirements.
Where your dental care is provided under the terms of the NHS, we are required to complete statutory forms to allow payments to be processed. This is an NHS requirement.
How we use your information
To provide you with the dental care and treatment that you need, we require up-to-date and accurate information about you.
We will share your information with the NHS, referral organisations (such as hospitals and professionals at other practices) and Denplan (if you are a member of this private dental plan provider) in connection with your dental treatment and healthcare.
We may contact you to conduct patient surveys or to find out if you are happy with the treatment you received for quality control purposes.
We will seek your preference for how we contact you about your dental care. Our usual methods are telephone, email or letter.
If we wish to use your information for dental research or dental education, we will discuss this with you and seek your consent. This may involve taking your information off site. Depending on the purpose and if possible, we will anonymise your information. If this is not possible we will inform you and discuss your options.
We may use your contact details to inform you of products and services available at our Practice.
We have CCTV at the practice for the purposes of patient and staff safety. Please see our policy for CCTV for further details.
Sharing information
Your information is normally used only by those working at the practice but there may be instances where we need to share it – for example, with:
- Your doctor
- The hospital or community dental services or other health professionals caring for you
- Specialist dental or medical services to which we may refer you
- NHS payment authorities
- The Department for Work and Pensions and its agencies, where you are claiming exemption or remission from NHS charges
- Dental laboratories
- Debt collection agencies
- Private dental schemes of which you are a member.
We will only disclose your information on a need-to-know basis and will limit any information that we share to the minimum necessary. We will let you know in advance if we send your medical information to another medical provider and we will give you the details of that provider at that time.
In certain circumstances or if required by law, we may need to disclose your information to a third party not connected with your health care, including HMRC or other law enforcement or government agencies.
Keeping your information safe
We store your personal information securely on our practice computer system and in a manual filing system. Your information cannot be accessed by those who do not work at the practice; only those working at the practice have access to your information. They understand their legal responsibility to maintain confidentiality and follow practice procedures to ensure this.
We take precautions to ensure security of the practice premises, the practice filing systems and computers.
We use high-quality specialist dental software to record and use your personal information safely and effectively. Our computer system has a secure audit trail and we back-up information routinely.
We keep your records for 10 years after the date of your last visit to the Practice or until you reach the age of 25 years, whichever is the longer. At your request, we will delete non-essential information (for example some contact details) before the end of this period.
Access to your information and other rights
You have a right to access the information that we hold about you and to receive a copy. We do not usually charge you for copies of your information; if we pass on a charge, we will explain the reasons.
You can also request us to
- Correct any information that you believe is inaccurate or incomplete. If we have disclosed that information to a third party, we will let them know about the change.
- Erase some of the information we hold. For legal reasons, we may be unable to erase certain information (for example, information about your dental treatment). However, we can, if you ask us to, delete some contact details and other non-clinical information.
- Stop using your information – for example, sending you reminders for appointments or information about our service. Even if you have given us consent to send you marketing information, you may withdraw that consent at any time.
- Stop using information if you believe the information is inaccurate or you believe we are using your information illegally.
- Supply your information electronically to another dentist.
- If we are relying on your consent to use your personal information for a particular purpose, you may withdraw your consent at any time and we will stop using your information for that purpose.
All requests should be made by email to our data protection officer at reception@accringtondentist.com
If you do not agree
If you do not wish us to use your personal information as described, you should discuss the matter with your dentist. If you object to the way that we collect and use your information, we may not be able to continue to provide your dental care.
If you have any concerns about how we use your information and you do not feel able to discuss it with your dentist or anyone at the practice, you should contact The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF (0303 123 1113 or 01625 545745).
What are cookies and why do we use them?
We use cookies to enhance your experience using our website, as almost all websites do today. Cookies are small text files that store information on your computer for a variety of functions.
We use cookies to:
- Keep the website running as you’d expect (for example keeping you logged in as you browse different webpages)
- Remember which pages or items you like the best, so we can show you personalised content.
- Let you share things you like on your social networks.
- Store some of your details, such as your log in details (but only if you want us to!)
- Cookies also help us evaluate our website. Knowing visitor levels, what device our visitors are using, which products people like the best and buy the most, social networks shares and how people have found us (search engines and links for example) helps us to make the website better for us and for you!
We will never use cookies to:
Store your personal information (unless you want us to, for example the ‘Remember Me’ button you see on the login page)
Pass on your information to third parties.
Types of cookies and what we each one for:
First Party: These are cookies set by us and only usable by us. They are the ones that keep you logged in during a browsing session .
Third Party: These are cookies set by third parties that we use. The only third party cookies we use are for evaluating our website (we use Google Analytics for this), and those that allow you to share things on your social media sites.
Session Cookies: These are temporary cookies that are deleted when you close your browser. These are the ones that keep you logged in as you browse from page to page.
If you still don’t want us to use cookies, that’s fine. Here’s some information on how to disable them:
Mozilla Firefox: Click ‘Tools’ at the top left of your Firefox window. Then click ‘Options’ and a smaller window should pop up. Click the ‘Privacy’ tab, and choose ‘use custom settings for history’ from the drop down box. Then you can uncheck the ‘Accept cookies from sites’ box to remove all cookies, or ‘Accept third-party cookies’ to just remove third party cookies. You can also choose to delete cookies every time you close firefox, or make it so you approve every cookie as they are about to be used by a site by keeping the ‘accept cookies’ box checked and choosing ‘I close firefox’ or ‘ask me every time’ in the ‘Keep until:’ drop down box.
Safari: In Safari 5.0 or earlier, click ‘Preferences’, ‘Security’ and then ‘Accept cookies’. There you will get the option to block all cookies, accept all cookies, or accept cookies just from sites you go to regularly. In Safari 5.1 or later, click ‘Preferences’ and ‘Privacy’, where you can choose to allow or block all cookies, or to block cookies from third parties and advertisers.
Internet Explorer: Click ‘Tools’ at the top left of your Explorer window. Then Click ‘Internet Options’ and a smaller window should pop up. Click the ‘Privacy’ tab at the top, and the settings slider allows you to choose the level of privacy you want. Clicking at the various intervals tells you what that level of privacy does for you. For example, the highest level of protection will block all cookies.
Google Chrome: Click the spanner icon on the main toolbar, then choose ‘options’ and then ‘under the hood’. Click on the ‘Privacy’ option, and then ‘content settings’. Clicking on ‘cookies’ will give you options to; delete all cookies, block all cookies, allow all cookies or to set preferences for different websites.
Contacting Us
If there are any questions regarding this privacy policy you may contact us by telephone 01254 790900 .