Our Privacy Statement
Health Communication between patients and the practice via email is discouraged due to the potential for miscommunication. Patients are encouraged to make an appointment.
FristGP@Wallsend collect personal and health related information about individuals for the principle purpose of assisting patients in managing their health and improving patient health outcomes. We require you to provide us with your personal details and a full medical history, so that we may properly assess, diagnose, treat and be proactive in your health care needs.
We may disclose personal and health information to other health care providers in line with our principle purpose, for research and quality assurance activities to improve individual health care, community health care and practice management. Some information is collected as part of the necessary process of running a business in Australia, for research and quality assurance activities to improve individual, community health care and practice management.
Usually information that does not identify you is used but should information that will identify you be required you will be informed and given the opportunity to “opt out” of any involvement.
Furthermore, we are required to use various government identifiers. For patients, these identifiers include Individual Healthcare Identifiers (IHI), Medicare card numbers, Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) file numbers, concession card details, and Safety Net Numbers. We may use your personal information and disclose it to various government departments and other entities to bill those entities for the health services that we provide to you.
You can obtain our privacy policy on the FirstGP website or request a copy of our privacy policy, which includes information about the collection and the use and disclosure of your health information. We require your consent to collect personal information about you and to use the information you provide in the following ways; for reminder letters which may be sent to you regarding your health care and management. You can decline to have your health information used in all or some of the ways outlined above, but it may influence our ability to manage your health care to provide the best outcome for you. If you request in writing for your information to be disclosed to third parties, we may elect to do that, and we may charge the third party for this information.