Practice Charter

• Patients should attend their appointments at the arranged time. If this is not possible they should inform the surgery as soon as possible.
• We expect that patients will understand that appointments are for one person only. Additional appointments should be made for more than one person.
• Patients are responsible for their own health, and the health of their children, and should co-operate with the practice in endeavouring to keep themselves healthy.
• Requests for help and advice for non-urgent matters should be made during surgery hours only.
• Home visits should only be requested for patients who are seriously ill or housebound.
• Requests for visits and advice at night should only be made for true emergencies.
• Many problems can be solved through advice alone, therefore patients should not always expect a prescription.
• This practice considers aggressive behaviour to be any personal, abusive and aggressive comments, cursing and/or swearing, physical contact and aggressive gestures.
• Abuse of staff is not acceptable whether verbal or physical. All abuse will be reported to the practice manager who will keep a log of incidents. The practice has the right to remove patients from its list.
• All physical abuse of any of our staff by our patients is reported to the police. The patient will then be removed immediately from our list. If the police are not informed, the Primary Care Trust will inform the patients of the need to register with a new doctor.

The practice is registered under the Data Protection Act. The majority of patient information is summarised and kept in our fully protected, highly efficient computer system with appropriate backup in case of emergency.

In order to comply fully with the Act we need to make sure that patients are aware of how we handle their medical records, both as paper files and electronic databases.

Medical Files
Doctors need to keep notes about any diagnoses, test results, treatments, including drug prescriptions etc, to provide better health care in the future, and also in the case of legal dispute. These notes are normally paper files, stored in a records room, but are now often held as electronic records, which are more flexible and easily found. You can view your medical record, provided you apply in writing, and the practice will arrange for a suitable time for this to take place.
Nurses and other health professionals may also need access to these records, and will add their own notes as part of the overall healthcare provision. Receptionists and other clerical staff will need access to some of the records in order to do administrative tasks and communicate with patients within the permitted limits of confidentiality.
We provide information by law to protect patients and the public at large.

How We Protect The Information
The sensitivity of patient information is well understood within the NHS. All staff are trained to understand their duty of confidentiality to patients, and have this written into their contracts. We keep paper and electronic records securely to prevent unauthorised access or misuse. Wherever practicable, we also remove references to personal details such as name and address, and often restrict it further to reduce the chances of anyone identifying a record as relating to an individual.

Activity And Accounting Information
In order to manage the NHS, information concerning treatments, drugs prescribed, number of patients seen, etc, is needed, and hospitals and general practices provide this information in returns to various central bodies. Such information normally has personal details such as name and address removed wherever possible. These returns are checked against patient files to prevent fraud as part of the NHS's statutory obligations. The NHS Fraud Office will contact patients to obtain their consent before records are checked.

Planning
To enable us to plan ahead to provide the maximum services required we might use summary information, not personal information.

Medical Research
Some medical research will involve patients directly (especially if taking part in clinical trials) when the circumstances will be fully explained, and the patient's express consent required. If they do not consent, then they will not be included in the trial. Other research only requires access to medical statistics, and can greatly improve our understanding of health and how to treat patients more effectively. Generally researchers only need information about groups of people, so that no individual information is apparent. In some cases they need individual records, but wherever possible these are provided in an 'anonymised' form so individuals cannot be identified.

Teaching
Some medical files are needed to teach student clinicians about rare cases. This will be carried out after obtaining the patient's consent.

Managing The Data
We need to move electronic information between systems, extracting the data and modifying it for the next system. Occasionally, tests will need to be made on the data to check that it has been transferred correctly. This will only be done under carefully controlled confidentiality.

Other Agencies
The NHS is not the only government service to provide care and it will be necessary for us to provide other agencies (eg Social Services) with appropriate information, but only with the patient's express signed consent (or that of their relatives if the patient is too ill, or considered unfit for other reasons such as minors or mentally incapable).