privacy
We are committed to maintaining the confidentiality of our patient's health information.
In order to support this commitment, please see below regarding collection of and access to confidential information. You can access our full Privacy Policy here.
Requirement for complete & up-to-date patient information
It is the responsibility of the patient to ensure all information provided to the Practice is accurate and up-to-date. Such information includes, but is not limited to: contact details, medicare, heath insurance, regular GP, in addition to next-of-kin and emergency contact details. If there is a change in your regular GP, it is your responsibility to notify the Practice. This is to ensure that any medical correspondence is sent to the appropriate health provider.
Please note that, at times, the Practice sends correspondence via email. When providing an email address it is therefore best to provide a personal one - as opposed to a work one - or at the very least one which ensures the privacy of any medical correspondence sent to you via email.
In order to support the Practice in maintaining accurate and up-to-date information in compliance with the Privacy Act (1988, revised in 2021), we ask for all patients to complete a Patient Registration form every 12 - 18 months.
Privacy passwords & privacy questions
To protect against unauthorised access to or misuse of personal information, we utilise patient identity authentication.
As part of the patient registration process, you are asked to create and answer a privacy question. The answer to this question acts as your privacy password. Should you contact us regarding any personal or medical information, our staff will ask for your privacy password in order to authenticate your identity.
If you would like to update your privacy question, or create a privacy question different to the options provided during the patient registration process, please contact us.
Consent to release medical information
Medical confidentiality is a set of rules that limits access to information discussed between a person and their healthcare practitioners. With only a few exceptions, anything you discuss with your doctor must, by law, be kept private between the two of you and the organisation they work for. This is also known as doctor–patient confidentiality.
As per our privacy policy, personal information that patients provide to the Practice is used only for the purpose for which it is provided, or for such other secondary purposes that are related to the primary purpose. We will not release any medical information to third parties without the written consent of the patient, or their legal guardian.
If you require your medical information be released to a third party, please complete and return a Consent to Release Medical Information form, which can be found here.
IT data protection
Our IT team regularly updates the privacy settings and procedures within our Practice in order to protect your medical records and mitigate the risk of data breaches.