Keeping your Information Secure and Confidential

We are working to improve your experience of joined up health and social care across the Thames Valley and Surrey area and to ensure that professionals are supported in meeting their duties to share information and to protect confidentiality. 

In order to achieve this, we are making local care records available to health and social care staff across the Thames Valley and Surrey area in compliance with current legislation – the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Data Protection Act 2018.

The GDPR provides the legal basis to process health and care data through implied consent for the purposes of direct patient care.

The Thames Valley and Surrey Care Records Partnership works within a framework for information governance and security as agreed across the partner areas. For more information on the specific policies and Data Privacy Impact Assessments across the region, please see Information Sharing in Your Local Area.

More details about your information rights can be found on the Information Commissioner’s Office website.

Data about you may also be used to help provide better health and care services, and improve health. This can be done by using data to plan health and care, and for research to find new treatments or new ways of doing things. They use this information to:

• understand more about disease
• develop new treatments
• monitor safety
• plan services and
• see if NHS policy is working.

Please follow this link for examples of how this is done.

When data is used for planning and research it is usually de-personalised or anonymised. This means that information that identifies who you are is removed.

There are strict rules about how your information can be used and your rights to object to its use.