How we use your information
To ensure you receive the most appropriate care, your doctor and any other health professional involved with your care hold records about the health, treatment and care you receive from the National Health Service (NHS).
To ensure you receive the most appropriate care, your doctor and any other health professional involved with your care hold records about the health, treatment and care you receive from the National Health Service (NHS).
Information we hold is recorded either within a manual record (written down) or alternatively held electronically on a computer.
Generally, these records include:
All staff working within the NHS have a legal duty to keep information about you confidential.
However, there may be instances where we may need to share your information with other health professionals or organisations such as social services, multi-disciplinary / healthcare teams and your GP, so that we can work together for your benefit.
We will only ever use or pass on information about you if others involved in your care have a genuine need for it. Anyone who receives information from us also has a legal obligation to keep it confidential.
We will always notify you of this first and gain your permission unless there are exceptional circumstances such as when the health or safety of others is at risk or where the law requires information to be passed on.
However, we are required by law to report certain information to the appropriate authorities. This is only provided after formal permission has been given by a qualified health professional.
Examples include:
Ambulance Data Sets (ADS)
South East Coast Ambulance Service routinely collect information from the initial contact when we receive a call in the 999 Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) through to completing an electronic patient record (EPR) with information about the patient and care we provide, when we attend an incident. Some of this information goes on to form part of the Ambulance Data Set (ADS).
If a patient is transferred from ambulance services to the care of an Emergency Department, information within the Ambulance Data Set is subsequently linked with key information collected in Emergency Departments as part of the Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS).
The purpose of this is to fully understand the patient’s journey from the ambulance service to other urgent and emergency healthcare settings. This will enable clinicians, ambulance services and the NHS to learn from patient journeys and further improve the care they provide in the future.
Data collected by ambulance services and emergency departments is securely linked and transferred to us. Data collected as part of the Ambulance Data Set is shared with NHS Digital* – a section of NHS England specialised in data and IT systems – where it is linked with key relevant information in the Emergency Care Data Set and securely returned to us.
This linked information includes a unique number generated by us during the initial 999 call, as well as a unique vehicle reference which will help us re-identify the original care record for the incident and the patient.
Appropriate access to this information will enable us to help develop the skills of our clinicians to improve the care they provide and support us in delivering service improvements to improve patient experience.
Patients will be able to opt out from this process, therefore disabling linking of data collected about their emergency episode of care, if they so wish, Please visit https://www.nhs.uk/your-nhs-data-matters/ for more information.
The lawful bases under common law for this process are as follows:
For the ambulance service to process this information the lawful basis is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is Article 6 (1)(e) – “…exercise of official authority” and for processing special categories (health) data the basis is: Article 9(2)(h) – ‘…health or social care…’ of the GDPR Regulations.
For the data collected by ambulance services (ADS) to be linked with relevant data items collected at Emergency Departments (ECDS) the lawful basis is the Sections 254(1), (3), (5) and (6), section 260(2)(d), section 261(2)(e) and section 304(9), (10) and (12) of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, as per the Ambulance Data Set Directions 2022.
To share linked data back with ambulance services, NHS England on behalf of Ambulance Services, have obtained a Section 251 approval, as required by the NHS Act 2006 and Health Service (Control of Patient Information) Regulations 2002.
Overall, the above provides a legal bases for patient information to be processed for these purposes.
*= NHS Digital officially merged with NHS England on 1st Feb 2023, therefore the organisation previously known as NHS Digital is legally known as NHS England and data held by NHS Digital is now held within NHS England.