Increasingly, patient medical data is shared e.g. between GP surgeries and District Nursing, hospital and other secondary care providers in order to give clinicians access to the most up to date patient information.
The systems we operate require that any sharing of medical information is consented to by patients beforehand. Patients must consent to sharing of the data held by a health provider out to other health providers and must also consent to which of the other providers can access their data.
e.g. it may be necessary to share data held in GP practices with district nurses but the local podiatry department would not need to see it to undertake their work. In this case, patients would allow the surgery to share their data, they would allow the district nurses to access it but they would not allow access by the podiatry department. In this way access to patient data is under patients' control and can be shared on a 'need to know' basis.
National Data Opt-Out
The national data opt-out is a service that was introduced on 25 May 2018, enabling patients to opt out from the use of their confidential, identifiable patient information being used as data for research or planning purposes. This is in line with the recommendations of the National Data Guardian in the Review of Data Security, Consent and Opt-Outs.
By September 2020 all health and care organisations are required to be compliant with the national data opt-out policy, where confidential patient information is used for research and planning purposes.
NHS Digital and Public Health England are already compliant and are applying national data opt-outs.
Patients can view or change their national data opt-out choice any time, by visiting www.nhs.uk/your-nhs-data-matters