We require your consent to collect personal information about you. Please read this information carefully, and sign where indicated below.
Collection
This medical practice collects information from you for the primary purpose of providing quality health care. We require you to provide us with your personal details and a full medical history so that we may properly assess, diagnose, treat and be proactive in your health care needs. This means we will use the information you provide in the following ways:
Administrative purposes in running our medical practice including telephone confirmation of appointments
Billing purposes, including compliance with Medicare and Health Insurance Commission requirements
Disclosure to others involved in your health care, including treating doctors and specialists outside this medical
practice. This may occur through referral to other doctors, or for medical tests and in the reports or results returned
to us following the referrals.
Disclosure to other doctors in the practice, locums and by Registrars attached to the practice for the purpose of
patient care, teaching and research.
Use and Disclosure
We will treat your personal information as strictly private and confidential. We will only use or disclose it for purposes directly related to your care and treatment, or in ways that you would reasonably expect that we may use it for your ongoing care and treatment. For example, the disclosure of blood test or biopsy results to your GP.
There are circumstances where we may be permitted or required by law to disclose your personal information to third parties. For example, to Medicare, Police, insurers, solicitors, government regulatory bodies, tribunals, courts of law, hospitals, debt collection agents, the electronic transfer of prescriptions service or to the Myhealth record system. We may also from time to time provide statistical data to third parties for research purposes.
We may disclose information about you to outside contractors to carry out activities on our behalf such as an IT service provider, solicitor or debt collection agent. Outside contractors are required not to use information about you for any purpose except for those activities we have asked them to perform.
We may also need to contact your General Practitioner and/or Specialists you have consulted, to request additional medical information from them.
Please let us know if you do not want your records accessed for these purposes and we will note your record
accordingly.
Data Quality and Security
We will take reasonable steps to ensure that your personal information is accurate, compete, up to date and relevant. For this purpose our staff may ask you to confirm that your contact details are correct when you attend a consultation. We request that you let us know if any of the information we hold about you is incorrect or out of date.
Personal information that we hold is protected by:
Access
You are entitled to request access to your medical records. We request that you put your request in writing and we will respond to it within a reasonable time.
There may be a fee for the administrative costs of retrieving and providing you with copies of your medical records.
We may deny access to your medical records in certain circumstances permitted by law, for example, if disclosure may cause a serious threat to your health or safety. We will always tell you why access is denied and the options you have to respond to our decision.