Confidentiality

This information is about the information we collect about you when your dentist is making a dental referral for you. We may also collect some additional information from you if you use certain elements of the website – such as the feedback forms. You can read more about this in our Privacy Notice.

Your dentist and other healthcare professionals caring for you keep records about your health and any treatment you receive from the NHS. These help to ensure that we provide you with the best possible care.

The information we hold about you may include:

• Basic details about you, such as address and dentists name
• The name and address of your medical practitioner
• Notes and reports about your health and any treatment and care you receive
• Results of investigations, such as X-rays and copies of those x-rays
• Relevant information from other health professionals, relatives or those who care for you and know you well

These types of data are both personal but also sensitive and therefore we have a significant duty of care to you to protect them. We take this very seriously.

You can find more information of how, and why, we process your data below – this is called a fair processing notice and includes our privacy policy.

We know that some of this can be confusing – so if you have any questions then please get in touch with us.

Referral Management Services Limited (RMSL) t/a FDS Consultants is a company registered in England and Wales under the registration number 11362661.

Our registered address is 61a King Street, Knutsford, Cheshire, England, WA16 6DX. All references to ‘RMSL’, ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’ are references to Referral Management Services Ltd t/a FDS Consultants.

The information that we process on behalf of dentists allows us :

• ensuring the healthcare professionals involved in your care have accurate and up-to-date information to assess your health and plan your treatment
• enabling consistency in your care should you be referred to a specialist or another part of the NHS
• assessing the type and quality of care you have received
• investigating any concerns or complaints you may have about your care
• send you text messages to help you understand the referral process, and find out how your care was delivered. We will only do this if your dentist has indicated that you consent to this

We may also use your information to help us manage and plan services to ensure everyone has access to high quality healthcare. This is called secondary uses and only uses totally anonymised data. This means that we remove any aspect of the referral information that could identify an individual. Some of the things that we might use this anonymised information for includes:

• using information about treatment to ensure services meet the needs of patients for the future
• to prepare statistics on NHS performance and activity
• training and educating staff
• helping staff to review care standards to improve the patient experience
• paying for healthcare services or auditing the accounts of healthcare organisations
• investigating complaints or legal claims
• undertaking research

Full details can be found in our Privacy Notice.

RMSL in partnership with FDS Consultants complies with the National Data Opt-out.

We only keep your data as long as we need to. This is longer than most services as we need to comply with the law and the NHS medical records management guidelines. There is useful information on how long we are required to keep your data in the NHS Records Management Code of Practice.

We do not send your details to any other organisation other than those service providers who provide your direct care, for example Hospitals and Primary Care services and then only to meet the minimum requirements of the referral process.

Everyone working for the NHS has a legal duty to keep information about you confidential in line with the NHS Confidentiality Code of Practice. The General Data Protection Regulations sets out principles of handling information which all NHS organisations must adhere to. We have put in place technology and security policies, rules and measures to protect your information.

Sometimes we may need to share information about you with other agencies so we can all work together for your benefit. We will only ever use or pass on information about you if others involved in your care have a genuine need for it. Anyone who receives information from us is also under a legal duty to keep it confidential and secure.

Dental Referrals will only use information given to us in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations. We have a legal duty to keep all information supplied by service users confidential. As a confidential service we will ask service users for their permission if we must contact other agencies, except where there are significant issues of risk such as child protection issues or harm to self or others. Anyone who receives information from us is also under a legal duty to keep it confidential.

Please see our privacy notice for details of how to access your health record.

Please contact us if you have any questions about the information that we hold about you.

Find out more information about NHS data, the GDPR regulations and your rights.