Confidentiality

Confidentiality

 

It is extremely important that survey respondents are provided with a confidential arena in which to provide open and honest responses to the survey questions being asked.  Working with Quality Health means this is guaranteed and individual responses are processed with this principle at the forefront of all operational activity.

 

It is equally important to achieve a good response rate to ensure the results are representative and provide a good quality data set.  In order to achieve this, survey programmes usually follow a reminder process to encourage people who have not responded to take part in the survey.  A barcode and reference number is generated on each survey purely for the purposes of managing this reminder process and is used to log receipt of questionnaires as they are received.  There are no identifying details on the survey other than the unique reference number and respondents are instructed not to write any personal details on these documents, so there has to be a process of ensuring that each uniquely numbered survey is matched with the right letter, ensuring that when the survey comes back, it is logged as received against the right person.  The only way this can be done is to print the unique reference number on the covering letter and survey documents so they can be matched prior to sending. 

 

The reminders are a vital part of the process in collating as much valuable feedback as possible and there would be no way of administering these appropriately and efficiently without use of such a system. Once a survey has been received, it is logged onto the system that controls administration of the send out data and is then bulk processed with all other surveys received in a particular day onto a separate secure data capture system.  No one in the Trust will ever see the completed survey and no Trust receives information about the views of any individual.  The Trust is unable to gain access to details about whether an individual has responded to the survey, and what they have said.  Quality Health receives thousands of surveys back each day, as we work for hundreds of NHS Trusts and Health Boards, on various survey programmes at any one time and these responses are bulk processed and held confidentially by Quality Health on secure in-house information management systems.  At the end of a survey, all response data received for each Trust is reported back by Quality Health to the Trust in the form of anonymised aggregate results.  Patient comments are anonymised and references to individuals are removed.

 

As an ISO27001 and IGSoC accredited organisation, Quality Health regards its responsibilities for data protection and confidentiality with the utmost importance.  Giving personal data to Trusts would break the Data Protection Act and is not only illegal but is also against Quality Health’s own principles of protecting the rights of respondents to confidentiality. There are some exceptions to this general rule, where it is clear that a duty of care issue has arisen – for example, where a patient or staff member asks directly for help, or where there is clear evidence of threatened self harm or harm to others. The number of such cases each year is extremely small. In these cases information is passed to Trusts so that they can intervene to assist the patient or staff member and an audit trail is established so that the actions taken can be tracked.

 

Once a survey is closed and all data processed and submitted, Quality Health follows robust data destruction procedures to undertake a full purge of its internal systems to securely and permanently destroy all Personal Data held, unless there is specific permission from patients to retain it.