Confidentiality Statement

Your medical records are safe with us. No information will usually be supplied to anyone not involved in your care, without written permission from you. However, your medical records may occasionally be disclosed to persons outside Woodlands Family Medical Centre for medical audit or research. The commonest reason for disclosure is medical audit to improve standards of care; for example, to check whether patients prescribed Warfarin tablets have regular blood test monitoring, or to review the care of patients with heart disease or diabetes. Trained external medical auditors usually extract relevant information from medical records because we do not have in-house resources to do all of this. Audits allow us to compare current levels of care against the best practice, so that we can continue to improve standards of care. The person given access to all records will be subject to the same duty of confidentiality as members of our general practice team. Information is usually anonymised after it is extracted. Where anonoymisation is not possible, for example, when medical researches need to post questionnaires directly to patients, the doctors will consider very carefully whether disclosure is justified. All patients have the right to personally object to personally identifiable information being used for audit or research, and their objection will be respected. Please contact us if you do not understand this or if you would like further information.