April 2025 update

Welcome We’d like to take this opportunity to welcome our York and North Yorkshire practices to the N3i DPO service. We will be doing an official welcome and discussing some of our most common issues in a webinar for all of our practices on 7th May at 12pm. An invite will follow this email – please feel free to share the invite with anyone in your organisation who you feel would benefit from an overview of IG issues such as deceased records, the serious harm test, police requests, data breach reporting and inappropriate staff access to records.

New blog – Re-assigning gender and sex identity Please see our new blog highlighting that all healthcare professionals should be aware that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has directed that the process for changing NHS numbers and gender markers for children and young people under 18 is stopped with immediate effect.

AI questionnaire Thanks once again to those Humber practices who responded to our AI questionnaire. The outcomes of the questionnaire can be viewed here. We can see from the charts that there is quite a spread of AI products that are already in use, but the level of interest is much higher than the current level of use. We will continue to support the safe onboarding of AI products through the use of DPIAs and risk assessments. We would also like to reaffirm that when we approve a DPIA, it is not the product that we are approving, it is the practice’s use of the product. There are many AI products that can be used both securely and insecurely, and it is the DPIA that will ensure the practice have evaluated how they will use it securely. We would also like to highlight the importance of the use of SOPs to ensure that all members of staff use the product in the same way – this is especially important for those products that can be easily downloaded onto mobile devices and can be used without management oversight.

York and North Yorkshire AI questionnaire As soon as we have a full distribution list for our newest practices, we will be sending out our short AI questionnaire so that we can direct our limited resources in the most appropriate places.

Humber practices DPO return We will soon be sending out our DPO Practice Returns (that all of York and North Yorkshire have just completed) to all practices in the Humber. This will ensure the data we hold about you is up to date (the last time we asked for this information was 2020…things change) and it will give practices the chance to sign up to our services if they previously chose not to. Please return them as soon as possible!