Increasingly, patient medical data is shared e.g. between GP surgeries and District Nursing, hospital and other secondary care providers in order to give clinicians access to the most up to date patient information.

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.

As we mention on our answerphone message, ALL calls into and out of Radyr Medical Centre are recorded. This is now standard practice across GP services in the NHS and allows us to monitor quality and respond appropriately to any queries or complaints that may arise. Recordings are made to a secure location within the building, not to an internet based "cloud" service and are stored for a short period before being deleted. We feel this offers patients numerous advantages when it comes to accurately responding to any complaints. Recordings will never be shared with other agencies without your consent and will not form a part of your patient record. If for any reason you are unhappy with this arrangement, you may opt out.