Privacy notice

It is a requirement of UK GDPR that organisations have in place a way to inform individuals about how their information will be used. This is generally called a Privacy Notice or sometimes a Transparency Notice. The ICO page here sets out clearly what must be included in any such notice.

There are a number of templates or examples of Privacy Notices around, and of course as all GP Practices are required to have it available on their web site you can easily see what others have done. It is noted that the Privacy Notice should be easy to find on a web site, generally with a clearly marked link from the bottom of the home page, but should not be confused with the web site privacy notice which will set out how the web site uses cookies and the personal data of visitors to the web site.

For those practices who use the N3i Data Protection Officer service a template Privacy Notice is here. You can of course add additional information to this, such as the details of your PCN, or additional services you may provide. Ideally the text in the document should be set out directly onto the web page so that patients do not need specific software to read it, and all web links should be checked to ensure they are available.