South West Surgery is committed to providing quality services to you and this policy outlines our ongoing obligations to you in respect of how we manage your Personal Information.

The Privacy Act 1988, amendments proclaimed December 2001, requires medical practitioners to obtain consent from their patients to collect, use and disclose the patient’s personal information. Your information will be transferred electronically to the surgeon as required.

Collection

This means we will collect information that is necessary to properly advise and treat you. Such necessary information may include:

  • Full medical history, family medical history
  • Ethnicity and genetic information
  • Contact details
  • Medicare, private health fund details and details for the issue of bills and

This information is normally collected directly from you. There may be occasions when we need to obtain information from other sources, for example:

  • Other medical practitioners such as former or current GP’s and specialists
  • Other healthcare providers such as physiotherapists, occupation therapists, pharmacists, nurses and dentists
  • Hospital and day surgery

Our practice staff and medical practitioners may participate in the collection of this information. In emergency situations, we may need to collect personal information from relatives or other sources where we are unable to obtain your prior express consent.

Website Privacy

For each visitor to reach the site, we expressively collect the following non-personally identifiable information, including but not limited to browser type, version and language, operating system, pages viewed while browsing the Site, page access times and referring website address. This collected information is used solely internally for the purpose of gauging visitor traffic, trends and delivering personalized content to you while you are at this Site.

From time to time, we may use patient information for new, unanticipated uses not previously disclosed in our privacy notice. If our information practices change at some time in the future we will use for these new purposes only, data collected from the time of the policy change forward will adhere to our updated practices.

Cookies

Third-party vendors, including Google, Facebook and others use cookies to collect non personally identifiable information, which is utilised for marketing and statistical purposes.

 

Use and Disclosure

With your consent, the practice staff will use and disclose your information for purposes such as:

  • Including account keeping and billing purposes
  • Referral to another medical practitioner or healthcare provider
  • Sending specimens such as blood samples, biopsies of skin or organs for analysis
  • Referral to a hospital for admission or other treatment options
  • Management of this practice
  • Quality assurance, practice accreditation and complaint handling
  • To meet our obligations of notification to our medical defence organisations or insurers
  • To prevent or lessen a serious threat to an individuals life, health or

Where legally required to do so, this practice must, without your consent, provide health information such as providing records to court, or notification of diagnosis of certain communicable diseases to the Health Department.

This practice may also without your consent, utilise your health information for purposes such as:

  • Research relevant to public health or public safety
  • The compilation or analysis of statistics relevant to public health or public safety
  • The management, funding or monitoring of our health

In these instances, reasonable steps will be taken to de-identify the information before it is disclosed.

Access

You are entitled to access your own health records at a time convenient to both yourself and the practice. Access can be denied where:

  • To provide access would create a serious threat to life or health
  • There is a legal impediment to access
  • Your request is frivolous
  • The information relates to anticipated or actual legal proceedings, and you would not be entitled to access the information in those proceedings
  • In the interests of national

Your request must be in writing. A charge of $100.00 will apply for photocopying and for staff time involved in the processing of your request. Where you dispute the accuracy of the information we have recorded, you are entitled to correct that information. It is our practice policy that we will take all steps to record all your corrections and place them in your file, but not erase the original record.

You will be asked to consent to the SouthWest Surgery WA to collect, use and disclose your personal information as outlined above. You are entitled to access your own health records, except where access would be denied as outlined above. You may also withdraw your consent to the use and disclosure of your personal information, except where legal obligations must be met.

 

 

Changes to this Privacy Policy

South West Surgery reserves the right to make amendments to this Privacy Policy at any time.

Contacting us

South West Surgery welcomes your comments regarding this Privacy Policy. If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy and would like further information, please contact us by any of the following means during business hours Monday to Friday.

Call: 08 9707 3320

E-mail: admin@southwestsurgerywa.com.au