The Station on Tanti Privacy Policy

 This Practice is subject to the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and relevant State Legislation operating in some States and territories of Australia. This document sets out the privacy policy for The Station on Tanti Family and Women’s Clinic.

Purpose

To ensure patients who receive care from The Station on Tanti Family and Women’s Clinic are comfortable in entrusting their health information to the Practice. This policy provides information to patients as to how their personal information is collected and used within the Practice, and the circumstances in which we may disclose it to third parties.

Scope

This policy applies to all staff and patients of The Station on Tanti.

Background and Rationale

The Australian Privacy Principles (APP) provide a privacy protection framework that supports the rights and obligations of collecting, holding, using, accessing and correcting personal information. The APP consist of 13 principle-based laws and apply equally to paper-based and digital environments. The APP complement the long-standing general practice obligation to manage personal information in a regulated, open and transparent manner.

Practice Procedure

The Practice will:

Provide a copy of the policy upon request
Ensure staff comply with the APP and deal appropriately with inquiries or concerns
Take such steps as are reasonable in the circumstances to implement practices, procedures and systems to ensure compliance with the APP and deal with enquiries or complaints
Collect personal information for the primary purpose of managing a patient’s healthcare and for financial claims and payments.
Staff Responsibility

The Practice’s staff will take reasonable steps to ensure patients understand:

What information has been and is being collected
Why the information is being collected, and whether this is due to a legal requirement
How the information will be used or disclosed
Why and when their consent is necessary
The Practice’s procedures for access and correction of information, and responding to complaints of information breaches, including by providing this policy.

Privacy Protection

I understand that, at ​The Station on Tanti, my rights to privacy are protected under the “Privacy Act 1988” and the “Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Act 2000”. With this knowledge, I give permission to be contacted through electronic means provided by myself or by the person in charge of my care. I allow the health information of the person in this registration form to be collected, used, disclosed or shared to enable the primary purpose of ongoing care and the secondary purpose of quality improvement, population health planning, and research. This may include, accounting procedures for the account management, diagnosis and treatments, Quality Assurance, general practice accreditation, Legal disclosures required by a court of law, population health planning, research, medical training/teaching, for seeking treatment by other medical practitioners in the practice and/or disease notification as required by law. The information may be collected through medical test results, consultation notes, Medicare and health insurance details, specialists’ correspondence and/or other relevant sources.

Collection of Information

The Practice will need to collect personal information as a provision of clinical services to a patient at the practice. Collected personal information will include patient’s:

Names, addresses and contact details
Medicare number (where available) for identification and claiming purposes
Healthcare identifiers
Medical information including medical history, medications, allergies, adverse events, immunisations, social history, family history and risk factors.

A patient’s personal information may be held at the Practice in various forms:

As paper records
As electronic records
As visual – x-rays, CT scans, videos and photos
As audio recordings
The Practice’s procedure for collecting personal information is set out below:

Practice staff collect patient’s personal and demographic information via registration form when patients present to the Practice for the first time. Patients are encouraged to pay attention to the patient consent and privacy agreement within the form and information about the management of collected information and patient privacy
During the course of providing medical services, the Practice’s healthcare practitioners will consequently collect further personal information
Personal information may also be collected from the patient’s guardian or responsible person (where practicable and necessary), or from any other involved healthcare specialists.
The Practice holds all personal information securely, whether in electronic format, in protected information systems or in hard copy format in a secured environment.

Digital Health

The Station on Tanti participates, collects and complies with all the Australian Digital Health Authority (ADHA) initiatives for electronically connecting the points of care so that your health information can be shared securely. We do so to help in facilitating to a connected system where every Australian is at the centre of their healthcare.

Use and Disclosure of Information

Personal information will only be used for the purpose of providing medical services and for claims and payments, unless otherwise consented to. Some disclosure may occur to the third parties engaged by or for the Practice for business purposes, such as accreditation or for the provision of information technology. These third parties are required to comply with this policy. The Practice will inform the patient where there is a statutory requirement to disclose certain personal information (for example, some diseases require mandatory notification).

The Practice will not disclose personal information to any third party other than in the course of providing medical services, without full disclosure to the patient or the recipient, the reason for the information transfer and full consent from the patient. The Practice will not disclose personal information to anyone outside Australia without need and without patient consent.

Exceptions to disclose without patient consent are where the information is:

Required by law
Necessary to lessen or prevent a serious threat to a patient’s life, health or safety or public health or safety, or it is impractical to obtain the patient’s consent
To assist in locating a missing person
To establish, exercise or defend an equitable claim
For the purpose of a confidential dispute resolution process.
The Practice will not use any personal information in relation to direct marketing to a patient without that patients express consent. Patients may opt-out of direct marketing at any time by notifying the Practice in a letter or email.

The Practice evaluates all unsolicited information it receives to decide if it should be kept, acted on or destroyed.

Access, Corrections and Privacy Concerns
The Practice acknowledges patients may request access to their medical records. Patients are encouraged to make this request in writing, and the Practice will respond within a reasonable time.

The Practice will take reasonable steps to correct personal information where it is satisfied they are not accurate or up to date. From time to time, the Practice will ask patients to verify the personal information held by the Practice is correct and up to date. Patients may also request the Practice corrects or updates their information, and the patients should make such requests in writing.

This Practice takes complaints and concerns about privacy of patient’s personal information seriously. Patients should express any privacy concerns in writing. The Practice will then attempt to resolve it in accordance with its complaint resolution procedure.

Please address complaints to:

The Station on Tanti Family and Women’s Clinic

107A Tanti Avenue

Mornington VIC 3931

Ph: 03 5977 2266

If a patient is dissatisfied with the handling of a complaint by the Practice, the patient can contact the relevant health complaints commissioner using the following information:

Health Complaints Commissioner

Level 26

570 Bourke Street

Melbourne VIC 3000

Ph: 1300 582 113 (freecall)