Beith Health Centre

Our Responsibilities To You

We are committed to giving you the best possible service.

Names: People involved in your care will give you their names and ensure that you know how to contact them. The surgery should be well signposted and the doctors' names indicated on their surgery room doors.

Waiting Time: We run an appointment system in this practice. You will be given a time at which the doctor or nurse hopes to be able to see you. You should not wait more than thirty minutes in the waiting room without receiving an explanation for the delay.

Telephone: We will try to answer the phone promptly and to ensure that there is sufficient staff available to do this.

Test Results: If you have undergone tests or x-rays ordered by the practice, we will inform you of the results at your next appointment. If no further appointment needs to be arranged, we will advise you when and how to obtain the results.

Respect: Patients will be treated as individuals and partners in their healthcare, irrespective of their ethnic origin or religious and cultural beliefs.

Information: We will give you full information about the services we offer. Every effort will be made to ensure that you receive the information which directly affects your health and care being offered.

Health Promotion: The practice will offer patients advice and information on:

• steps they can take to promote good health and avoid illness

• self-help which can be undertaken without reference to a doctor in the case of minor ailments.

Your Responsibilities To Us

Help us to help you

Please let us know if you change your name, address or telephone number.

Please do everything you can to keep appointments. Tell us as soon as possible if you cannot. Otherwise other patients may have to wait longer.

We need help too. Please ask for home visits by the doctor only when the person is too ill to visit the surgery.

Please keep your phone call brief and avoid calling during the peak morning time for non urgent matters. Test results take time to reach us, so please do not ring before you have been asked to do so. Enquiries ordered by the hospital should be directed to the hospital, not the practice.

We ask that you treat the doctors and practice staff with courtesy and respect. The practice will not tolerate or accept violent or abusive behaviour from any patient directed towards any member of the practice team, patients or visitors to the practice. Such action will result in the perpetrator being removed from our practice list.

Remember, you are responsible for your own health and the health of your children. We will give you our professional help and advice. Please act on it.

Please ask if you wish to see your doctor.

Complaints Procedure

We always try to provide the best services possible, but there may be times when you feel this has not happened. Our in-house complaints procedure was drawn up to respond to patient grievances.

We hope you will use it to allow us to look into and, if necessary, correct any problems that you have identified, or mistakes that have been made.

If you wish to make a complaint, please telephone or write to our practice manager, Mrs Hughes, or ask at reception for a complaint leaflet.

We believe it is important to deal with complaints swiftly, so you will receive a letter of acknowledgement within three days. Occasionally it may take longer, but we will keep you informed throughout. We will try to address your concerns, provide you with an explanation and discuss any action that may be needed.

Please note that we have to respect our duty of confidentiality to patients and a patient's consent will be necessary if a complaint is not made by the patient in person.

Patient Participation/Representation Group

The practice values your comments and would like to encourage you to join the Practice Participation Group. If you wish to join, please leave your details with the receptionists or ask to speak to Genevieve Hughes, practice manager, if you are interested in working with us to improve the service provision in Beith and the surrounding practice area.

Your Personal Health Information

To provide you with the care you need, we hold the details of your consultations, illnesses, tests, prescriptions and other treatments that have been recorded by everyone involved in your care. We sometimes disclose some of your personal health information with other organisations involved in your care, for example: specialists at the hospital. This practice participates in regional and national programmes such as the cervical cytology screening service and your name, address, date of birth and health number will be given to them in order to send an invitation.

We need to use some of your personal health information for administrative purposes. In order to receive payment for services provided to you, we have to disclose basic details about you to the Ayrshire & Arran NHS Board and to the Common Services Agency for the Scottish Health Service. These organisations have a role in protecting public funds and are authorised to check that payments are being properly made. We are required to co-operate with these checks and the disclosure of your data is a necessary part of our provision of healthcare services.

Sometimes we participate in studies that are designed to improve the way services are provided to you to check that our performance meets required standards and benchmarks. Whenever we take part in activities such as these, we will ensure that, as far as possible, any details that may identify you are not disclosed.

We are sometimes involved in health research and the teaching of student nurses and other health professionals. We will not use or disclose your personal health information for these purposes unless you have been informed beforehand and given your consent for us to do so.

Sometimes we are required by law to pass on information to the government, eg the notifications of births and deaths and certain diseases or crimes.

Our use of your personal health information is covered by a duty of confidentiality and is regulated by the Data Protection Act. The Act gives you a number of rights in relation to how your personal information is used, including a right to access the information we hold about you.

Everyone working for the NHS has a legal duty to keep information about you confidential and adheres to a Code of Practice on protecting patient confidentiality. Further information on this can be found at www.nhsis.co.uk/confidentiality.

Anyone who receives information from us is also under a legal duty to keep it confidential.

Freedom Of Information – Publication Scheme

The Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 obliges the practice to produce a Publication Scheme. A Publication Scheme is a guide to the ‘classes’ of information the practice intends to routinely make available.

This scheme is available from reception.