PATIENT DATA RETENTION POLICY

Arnold & Son (Petersfield) Limited t/a Richard C Arnold Optometrists, are compliant with the GDPR regulations which came into force on 25 May 2018.

RETENTION OF INFORMATION

For legitimate purposes, e.g. to send you recall letters, we hold various details about you.  This includes information such as your name, address, telephone number and email address, and clinical details such as the state of health of your eyes, your spectacle and/or contact lens prescription, and copies of any letters we have written about you or received from other professionals, such as your doctor.    

We retain this information for as long as you are a client with us.    

In accordance with GOC Guidelines (General Optical Council), we must retain records for a minimum of seven years.  

This policy applies to the following:
     o    Spectacle records
     o    Contact lens records
     o    Appointment diaries

• All records are retained for 10 years* from the date of last seeing the client.
• Records of children are retained until they are 25, AND it is 10 years since they were last seen.
• Records of the deceased are kept for 10 years.
• Records are destroyed by shredding.

NHS PATIENTS

If you are an NHS patient, we are obliged to provide the portion of your record that relates to NHS services to authorised persons within the NHS (who are in turn subject to a duty of confidentiality) if they request this. This is usually to confirm that we have provided the NHS services that we have been paid for, and to improve quality of care.  It is also possible that the NHS may contact you to ask if you have received services (such as a sight test or spectacles) as part of this monitoring.

We adhere to the guidelines of the College of Optometrists and the GDPR Regulations and will not pass any of your personal information to a third party without your consent, unless there is a clear public interest duty to do so.    

MARKETING AND PROMOTIONS

We do not sell your information to third parties.   We may send you promotional material or newsletters from time to time, but this will be minimal i.e. 2-3 times per year.    If you do not wish to receive any promotional material or newsletters from us in electronic format, please let us know.   

Within the practice we may use your information to analyse trends, or to audit our performance. This enables us to monitor and improve the quality of care that we offer you.  Wherever possible (i.e. if we do not need to know who an individual patient is) we will only analyse trends from anonymised information.

SUBJECT ACCESS REQUEST

You are entitled to a copy of the information we hold for you.  There would be no charge for this; however, should you request further copies we may make an administrative charge for providing the information.  This would be no more than £10.    If you wish to see your records, we will respond as quickly as possible, and in any case are required to do so within one month**.