Patient Privacy Policy

At Ipswich Orthopaedic Group our primary concern is providing you with treatment and healthcare of the highest quality. This requires a relationship of trust and confidentiality – one where we treat your personal health information appropriately and respect your privacy.

As such, we will handle your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy and in compliance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles.

Our orthopaedic specialists, nurses, and administration staff work together to provide your orthopaedic treatment. They may need access to your personal health information to make sure we provide the most appropriate care.

You are entitled to know what personal information is held about you, how you can access it, why it is held, to whom we may disclose it, and when we need your consent to do this. This Policy explains all these details. You can discuss any issue relating to the privacy of your information with your doctor.

 

Personal Information

Personal information is any information or an opinion about an identified individual or an individual who can be reasonably identified from the information or opinion. Information or an opinion may be personal information regardless of whether it is accurate.

Collecting information

Our orthopaedic specialists and staff collect information that helps us provide the level of advice, care and management you need, or where there is a statutory requirement for collection.

This information may include:

• contact details and date of birth
• relationship status
• medical history
• family medical history
• symptoms, diagnosis and recommended treatment
• ethnicity
• Medicare/private health fund details, and
• billing or account details
• images (including photographs, radiological images and intraoperative images) of the affected body part taken before, during or following surgical intervention.

We normally collect this information directly from you, but we may need to get it from other sources – for example, from other medical practitioners, health funds, health providers, or (with your consent) from your family members.

We use cookies on our website. A cookie is a small text file that the website may place on your device to store information. We may use persistent cookies (which remain on your computer even after you close your browser) to store information that may speed up your use of our website for any of your future visits to the website. We may also use session cookies (which no longer remain after you end your browsing session) to help manage the display and presentation of information on the website. You may refuse to use cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser. However, please note that if you do this, you may not be able to use the full functionality of our website.

Purposes for handling your information

To ensure we provide you with the most appropriate treatment, our orthopaedic specialists and staff may collect, hold, use and disclose your personal and medical information for any of the following purposes:

• sharing your information within the treatment team;
• communicating with the referring medical practitioners;
• referrals to other medical practitioners, hospitals or health providers;
• referring specimens to external laboratories for analysis;
• accounts and billing, including Medicare and private health insurance claims;
• managing our practice – including quality assurance, practice accreditation, market analysis and keeping our records up-to-date;
• complaints and incident handling, and notifications to our insurers;
• disclosure, where legally required, to third parties – for example, in response to a court subpoena or for mandatory reporting of specific diseases;
• disclosure to our service providers, where doing so is necessary for your treatment or for our management and administrative purposes; and
• submitting a summary to the Australian Orthopaedic Association National Joint Registry, where appropriate.  This information may be further supplied to other government and statutory bodies, all in compliance with regulatory requirements. In all these cases we remove any information that personally identifies you.

We may also use non-identifying information from your medical file for data analysis, research, medical teaching, patient education or peer review purposes.

If you request us to send materials related to your treatment to another country we will be required to disclose your personal information to people in that country.

We use secure services, hosted in Australia, to manage communications and patient medical records. Accordingly, your personal information will be securely held by that service.

Data quality and security

We take all reasonable steps to ensure the personal information we collect, use, hold or disclose is accurate, complete, up-to-date and relevant to the functions and services we provide. You can help us achieve this by providing correct and up-to-date information. When we exchange your personal information internally, we will do so via encrypted emails where possible. If you ask us to exchange your personal information with an external party, we may send your personal information by unencrypted (i.e. normal) email to ensure that the external recipient can access this information.

We store your personal information securely and protect it from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.

Access and correction

In all but a few rare cases, you can access the personal information we hold about you, in part or in full, or ask us to provide it to a third party (e.g. another healthcare provider). If we refuse your request we will provide a written notice setting out the reasons for this refusal.

We may require you to make this request in writing. There may be an administration fee for this service, depending on the nature of access required.

If you feel any of the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate or incomplete, please let us know. We will take all reasonable steps to note your corrections and add them to your records. In accordance with good clinical practice, we do not erase the original record.

 

Retention of records

We will retain your medical records in accordance with all regulatory requirements and best industry practices.

Complaints

We want to make sure your expectations about your privacy protection are the same as ours. If you have any concerns, please discuss them with your doctor.

You may also complain to:

Office of the Australian Information Commissioner

GPO Box 5288 Sydney NSW 2001
Privacy hotline: 1300 363 992
Website: www.oaic.gov.au

or

The Office of the Health Ombudsman

PO Box 13281 George Street Brisbane Qld 4003
Call: 133 OHO (133 646)

Fax: (07) 3319 6350
Email:
Health service complaints: complaints@oho.qld.gov.au
General enquiries or questions: info@oho.qld.gov.au 

Website:  www.oho.qld.gov.au

Changes to this policy

From time to time, we may update this privacy policy, any changes to our policy will be published on our website.

You may obtain a copy of our current policy from our website.