The Data Protection Act is changing in May and there are significant changes relating to privacy. This page is designed to help you understand how we store and manage your data, who has access to it and how you can access it.

The first big change is that we now have to seek consent to communicate with all our patients, staff, suppliers and allied professionals via letter, phone, fax, e-mail and text. As you can imagine this is a huge administration burden and it must be done by the May deadline.

In order to reduce the administration burden and to get the bulk of consents quickly we will be sending a text message to all patients for whom we hold mobile numbers for. Please help us to help you by replying “START” to the text if you are happy for us to continue communication with you. If you do not get a text but think we should have your mobile number, please check we have the correct one, often patients forget to give us their new numbers. We will then run a search on all those who have not replied and contact them independently using a variety of other methods. There is a “Consent to Communicate” form that is available at the surgery for those visiting in the next month. Please see our privacy notice under the about screen and then click on practice  policies