Cargills Optometrists hold various pieces of information about you including your name, date of birth, address and clinical details such as your eye health status, retinal photographs, retinal scans, your spectacle and/or contact lens prescription and copies of any letters written about you or received from other professionals, such as your doctor. You are entitled to a copy of this information, however there may be an administrative charge for multiple requests. If you wish to see your records, please contact a partner at the relevant practice and we will respond as quickly as possible. We are required to respond to a subject access request within one month. If you require independent advice, please contact the Information Commissioners Office at https://ico.org.uk/.
We adhere to the guidelines of the College of Optometrists and the General Data Protection 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. You will need to provide us with your written consent if you wish us to pass your information to another optometrist. In accordance with the College of Optometrists guidance we retain records for a period of 10 years or until the age of 25 for children under 18, whichever is later.
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.
Within the practice we may use the 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.
Website Analytics
In our ongoing efforts to ensure a user-friendly experience and respect your privacy, we have moved from Google Analytics to Fathom Analytics. Fathom is a privacy-centric analytics service that offers valuable insights into user interactions with our website, without the use of cookies or compromising your privacy.
This addition enables us to maintain a high-quality user experience and align our practices with the latest privacy standards. Importantly, the implementation of Fathom Analytics reduces our reliance on cookie-based analytics.
Data Processing
We process personal data on the following lawful basis:
- Legitimate interests
- The provision of health care
- For the performance of a contract with the data subject
If you have any queries please contact us and we will be happy to help.
The Partners
Cargills Optometrists
| Document name: Privacy Notice
Author: B Dalton Approved by: Paul Thompson Version Date: 20 Dec 2023 Review Date: Annually |
