Patient Privacy & Data Protection Statement

As your optician, we record your personal details on our computer system in order to provide you with clinical care and dispensing services.

This data is collected and held under the legal remit of health or social care purposes.

For legal and professional reasons we are obliged to retain such data for a significant period after our last contact with you. The advice from our professional body, the College Of Optometrists, is that this should be 10 years after our last contact in the case of adults, or in the case of children (under 16) 10 years after they were last seen or their 25th birthday, whichever is the later. After that time we will anonymise or delete your data therefore you will no longer be identifiable on our database.

We understand that holding your data is a significant responsibility and we give the following undertakings:

1. We will only ask for and store data that is necessary to provide you with the clinical and dispensing services we provide.
2. That data is held in a secure computerised database, and can only be accessed by our own staff, who use PINs to maintain security.
3. We will not make your data available to any 3rd party – e.g. your GP or the Hospital Eye Service - without your permission.*
4. We will not supply your data to any 3rd party for commercial purposes, ever.
5. You have the right to inspect the data we hold about you, and will make any corrections that you request as soon as practically possible.
6. We will use your contact details to let you know when your appointments are due, and when your glasses, contact lenses and other products are available for collection.
7. For the purposes of theft prevention, we use a CCTV loop with footage retained for a period of 48 hours only, and would only ever be made available to law enforcement agencies on request.
8. As is advised under the GDPR guidance we have procedures in place in the unlikely event that there is a data breach and would comply with ICO notification guidance if applicable.

If you have any concerns about the data that we hold about you, your children or other adults for whom you are responsible, then please raise these with our General Manager Mr A. Connell BSc MCOptom in the first instance.

*nb the one exception to statement [3] would be in extreme circumstances concerning public safety - e.g. the DVLA.