In accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 and Access to Health Records Act, patients may request to see their medical records. Such requests should be made through the practice manager and may be subject to an administration charge. No information will be released without the patient consent unless we are legally obliged to do so.

Routine appointments will be dealt with according to availability and will be affected by holidays/illness. We do our best to meet reasonable requests and we discuss abuse of our appointment system with patients. Our doctors alone held over 22 000 surgery appointments last year and carried out over 2000 home visits.

We have routine appointments available for booking and always keep a number of appointments each day for urgent problems that arise. The demand for appointments however is still high and we do our best to meet patients’ needs.

All patients are entitled to have a chaperone (someone to accompany you) for any consultation, examination or procedure where they feel one is required.This chaperone may be a family member or friend. On occasions you may prefer a formal chaperone to be present i.e. a practice nurse.

Wherever possible we would ask you to make this request at the time of booking your appointment, so that arrangements can be made and your appointment is not delayed in any way. Where this is not possible we will endeavour to provide a formal chaperone at the time of request but occasionally it may be necessary to change your appointment to another time or day.

Your healthcare professional may also require a chaperone to be present for certain consultations in accordance with our chaperone policy.

If you have any question please contact the practice manager.

We always try to give you the best services possible but there may be times when you feel this has not happened.  If you have a complaint or concern about the service you have received from the doctors or any of the staff working in this practice, please let us know.  We operate a practice complaints procedure as part of an NHS system for dealing with complaints.

We hope that most problems can be sorted out easily and quickly, often at the time they arise and with the person concerned.  If your problem cannot be sorted out in this way and you wish to make a complaint, we would like you to let us know as soon as possible – ideally within a matter of days or at most a few weeks – because this will enable us to establish what happened more easily.  If it is not possible to do that please let us have details of your complaint:

• within 6 months of the incident that caused the problem; or
• within 6 months of discovering that you have a problem, provided this is within 12 months of the incident.

Complaints should be addressed to Miss Emily Smith, Practice Manager, or any of the doctors.  Alternatively, you may ask for an appointment with Miss Smith in order to discuss your concerns.  She will explain the complaints procedure to you and will make sure that your concerns are dealt with promptly.  It will be a great help if you as specific as possible about your complaint.

You can find our full complaint policy here: https://assets.practice365.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/424/2021/05/COMPLAINTS-HANDOUT-FOR-PATIENT-SEPT-23.pdf:

We hope that if you have a problem, you will use our practice complaints procedure.  We believe this will give us the best chance of putting right whatever has gone wrong and an opportunity to improve our practice.  But this does not affect your right to approach our commissioners, the West Yorkshire ICB, if you feel you cannot raise your complaint with us or you are dissatisfied with the result of our investigation.

Their contact details are listed below:

WY ICB Complaints Team

White Rose House

West Parade

Wakefield

WF1 1LT

Telephone: 01924 552150 (9am-5pm Mon-Fri excl. Bank Holidays)

Email: [email protected]

The practice complies with data protection and access to medical records legislation. Identifiable information about you will be shared with others in the following circumstances:

• To provide further medical treatment for you e.g. from district nurses and hospital services.
• To help you get other services e.g. from the social work department. This requires your consent.
• When we have a duty to others e.g. in child protection cases anonymous patient information will also be used at local and national level to help the Health Board and Government plan services e.g. for diabetic care.

If you do not wish anonymous information about you to be used in such a way, please let us know.

Reception and administration staff require access to your medical records in order to do their jobs. These members of staff are bound by the same rules of confidentiality as the medical staff.

Due to high levels of patients not attending appointments, we have reviewed our practice policy. Patients who fail to attend appointments and do not contact the surgery in advance will be managed according to the practice DNA policy as outlined below:

• Any patient who misses their appointment without cancelling in advance will be sent a standard text reminder notifying them of the missed appointment and reminding them of our policy if they continue to miss appointments.
• If a patient fails to attend two appointments within the last 12 months, their case will be discussed at a practice meeting. An informal warning letter may be sent to the patient, advising them that further missed appointments could result in removal from the practice.
• If the patient fails to attend a third appointment within 12 months of receiving a warning letter, the matter will be discussed at a practice meeting, and a majority agreement will be reached regarding whether the patient will be removed from the practice list. The patient will be informed of the outcome of this meeting with a formal letter.
• Warning letters are valid for a period of 12 months. Removal based on warnings older than 12 months will be invalid. In such cases, a further formal warning and grace period will be required.
• For parents, please note that the above policy will also apply to children who are not brought to their appointments. Missed appointments will prompt a discussion in a practice meeting and a review with our safeguarding lead. Failing to bring children to their appointments can be indicative of other problems that would necessitate further action.

Information about the General Practitioners and the practice required for disclosure under this act can be made available to the public. All requests for such information should be made to the practice manager.

New contractual requirements came into force from 1 April 2014 requiring that GP practices should make available a statement of intent in relation to the following IT developments:

1. Summary Care Record (SCR)
2. GP to GP Record Transfers
3. Patient Online Access to Their GP Record
4. Data for commissioning and other secondary care purposes

The same contractual obligations require that we have a statement of intent regarding these developments in place and publicised by 30 September 2014.

Please find below details of our stance with regards to these developments.

GP to GP Record Transfers

NHS England requires practices to utilise the GP2GP facility for the transfer of patient records between practices, when a patient registers or de-registers (not for temporary registration).

It is very important that you are registered with a doctor at all times. If you leave your GP and register with a new GP, your medical records will be removed from your previous doctor and forwarded on to your new GP via NHS England. It can take your paper records several weeks to reach your new surgery.

With GP to GP record transfers your electronic record is transferred to your new practice much sooner.

King Cross Surgery confirms that GP to GP transfers are already active and we send and receive patient records via this system.

Patient Online Access to Their GP Record

NHS England require practices to promote and offer the facility to enable patients online access to appointments, prescriptions, allergies and adverse reactions or have published plans in place to achieve this by 31^st of March 2015.

We currently offer the facility for booking and cancelling appointments and also for ordering your repeat prescriptions on-line. This is done by the SystmOne Online facility. If you do not already have a user name and password for this system – please register for them by speaking to a Service Advisor at Reception.

King Cross Surgery confirms that access to the Summary Care Record is available for patients to view using SystmOne Online.

NHS England also requires practices, by 31st March 2016, to promote and offer the facility for patients to access online all information from their medical record which is held in coded form unless, in the opinion of the practice, access would cause serious harm to the patient’s or any other person’s,  physical or mental health; or that the information includes a reference to a non-consenting third party; or that the record contains a free text entry that cannot be separated from the coded entry.

We are currently awaiting clear national guidance relating to this and will open this facility up to patients once received.

Data for commissioning and other secondary care purposes

It is already a requirement of the Health and Social Care Act that practices must meet the reasonable data requirements of commissioners and other health and social care organisations through appropriate and safe data sharing for secondary use.

King Cross Surgery confirms these arrangements are in place and that we undertake annual training and audits to ensure that all our data is handled correctly and safely via the Information Governance Toolkit.

30 September 2014 – Updated 23 March 2016

The NHS operate a zero tolerance policy with regard to violence and abuse and the practice has the right to remove violent patients from the list with immediate effect in order to safeguard practice staff, patients and other persons. Violence in this context includes actual or threatened physical violence or verbal abuse which leads to fear for a person’s safety. In this situation we will notify the patient in writing of their removal from the list and record in the patient’s medical records the fact of the removal and the circumstances leading to it.