CONFIDENTIALITY

Your Rights to Confidentiality Whatever your age, ability, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief or ethnicity.

What does confidentiality mean?

When you are looking for information, advice or support for yourself you will want to make sure that the person you go to respects your privacy. An important part of protecting your privacy is making sure that members of staff do not tell anyone anything about you without asking you first.

What are your rights to confidentiality?

We provide a confidential service to all who attend no matter what your age, ability, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief or ethnicity.  This means that you can tell others about this visit, but we won’t.
There is no law about confidentiality. However if a member of staff thought you or someone else was at risk of serious harm this would allow confidentiality to be broken

Will my GP (own Doctor) be informed?

If you do not wish your GP Practice to know, we will respect this and we will not tell them. However if you are started on hormonal contraception it maybe helpful for them to be aware of this.

If someone talks about me?

If any member of staff in the health service discloses information about you without good reason to another person they will be in serious trouble.
Nurses, Doctors, Receptionists and Counsellors know you have a right to confidentiality. If your privacy is not protected you have a right to complain.
We also cannot guarantee the confidentiality of other people attending these sexual health services and would hope that you would respect their confidentiality.

What about test results?

You will only be contacted if your results are positive, but you choose how to receive these results, e.g. by text, by telephone, by email or any other means that is acceptable to you.

Sharing of information?

The only reason we might have to consider passing on confidential information without your permission, would be to protect you or someone else from very serious harm.  This happens very rarely and we would always try to discuss this with you first. Whatever is decided, they will continue to support you throughout.

Data Protection

Personal details will be stored on a client database accessed only by specific Family Planning & Sexual Health staff members. Anonymised information will be used for national and regional statistics