Increasingly, patient medical data is shared e.g. between GP surgeries and District Nursing, in order to give clinicians access to the most up to date information when attending patients.

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.

We would like to reassure our patients that the proposed extraction of GP data by NHS Digital DOES NOT include any patients registered with this practice or in NHS Scotland.  NHS Digital provide services in England so are not able to access any data held in Scotland.  You are not required to opt out as your data is already safe.

We take patients confidentially extremely seriously and safeguards are in place to protect this, including when data is used for research.

Further information on how NHS Scotland handles your personal information is on the NHS Inform website: 

How NHS handles your personal information