Practice Charter

Rights And Responsibilities Of Patients

As a patient of this practice you have a right to be treated with respect, have any complaints dealt with professionally and expect access according to the targets the practice has agreed with the Eastern Health and Social Services Board.

You also have responsibilities - to take responsibility for your own health, not to abuse the service, to treat doctors and staff reasonably and to keep appointments. If you are unable to keep your appointment, please notify the surgery so that we can offer the appointment to another patient.

When making an appointment you may state your preference of doctor but you may have to wait longer for the doctor of your choice.

Violence whether verbal, implied or actual will not be tolerated. Patients who behave in a violent manner will be asked to leave our list and those causing actual violence will be reported to the police.

The Eastern Health and Social Services Board have contracted this practice to provide primary medical services. Their address is:
12-22 Linenhall Street,
Belfast BT2 8BS.

Telephone: 028 9032 1313.

The practice provides all essential and additional services under the GP contract. We also provide a range of Enhanced Services.

The Eastern Health and Social Services Board has a statutory responsibility to account for its use of public funds. This includes auditing of payments made to GPs for the services that they provide.

To enable the authority to perform this function it may be necessary for Health Authority staff, who would normally be medically qualified, to have access to personal information including records of attendance made at the surgery and of the services provided. In such circumstances the records are anonymised as far as possible.

Such checks will only be carried out by a small number of Health Authority staff who must keep all information about patients completely confidential. They are reminded of this by being required to sign a special confidentiality agreement. You do have the right to object to information about you being used for audit purposes. You should tell the practice, preferably in writing. Any such objections will be respected.

As a training practice the quality of our records and practice have to be assessed by other doctors every three years. The same conditions apply.

Complaints

We realise that occasionally things do not go as smoothly as we would like. If you think this has happened please speak to the practice manager. A leaflet is available at reception explaining our complaints procedure.

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions for improving the way the practice operates we would be glad to hear from you.

Confidentiality

Everyone working for the HPSS (Health and Personal Social Services) has a legal duty to keep information about you confidential.

You may be receiving care from other people as well as the HPSS. So that we can work together for your benefit we may need to share some information about you.

We only ever use or pass on information about you if people have a genuine need for it and it is in yours and everyone's interest. Whenever we can we shall remove details which identify you. The sharing of some types of very sensitive personal information is strictly controlled by the law.

Anyone who receives information from us is also under a legal duty to keep it confidential.We use statistical data, which is completely anonymised, to monitor quality and performance.

Further information may be requested from the practice manager.