This information is about the information we collect about you when your dentist is making a dental referral for you. We may also collect some additional information from you if you use certain elements of the website – such as the feedback forms. You can read more about this in our Privacy Policy and Fair Processing Notice below.
Who are we? We are an NHS Business Partner – an independent organisation that supplies services to the NHS. All of our contact details can be found here.
Your dentist and other healthcare professionals caring for you keep records about your health and any treatment you receive from the NHS. These help to ensure that we provide you with the best possible care.
The information we hold about you may include:
These types of data are both personal but also sensitive and therefore we have a significant duty of care to you to protect them. We take this very seriously.
Its important for you to know that we do not share any of your information with anyone other than those people who are responsible for your care. The only exception to this is described below in “secondary uses” and these data are completely anonymous.
You can find more information of how, and why, we process your data below – this is called a fair processing notice and includes our privacy policy.
We know that some of this can be confusing – so we have produced a very simple information sheet for you here, and if you have any questions – then please get in touch with us.
You can contact us by email at d.referrals@nhs.net or you can call us on 0845 8620841 (calling this number costs 2p per minute).
Referral Management Services Limited (RMSL) t/a FDS Consultants is a company registered in England and Wales under the registration number 11362661.
Our registered address is 61a King Street, Knutsford, Cheshire, England, WA16 6DX. All references to ‘RMSL’, ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’ are references to Referral Management Services Ltd t/a FDS Consultants.
The information that we process on behalf of dentists allows us :
We may also use your information to help us manage and plan services to ensure everyone has access to high quality healthcare. This is called secondary uses and only uses totally anonymised data. This means that we remove any aspect of the referral information that could identify an individual. Some of the things that we might use this anonymised information for includes:
Full details of our Privacy Notice can be found here.
RMSL in partnership with FDS Consultants complies with the National Data Opt-out. For more information see https://www.nhs.uk/your-nhs-data-matters/.
We only keep your data as long as we need to. This is longer than most services as we need to comply with the law and the NHS medical records management guidelines. There is useful information on how long we are required to keep your data on the NHS website here.
We do not send your details to any other organisation other than those service providers who provide your direct care, for example Hospitals and Primary Care services and then only to meet the minimum requirements of the referral process.
Please contact us if you have any questions about the information that we hold about you. You can find all our contact details on this page.
Everyone working for the NHS has a legal duty to keep information about you confidential in line with the NHS Confidentiality Code of Practice. The General Data Protection Regulations sets out principles of handling information which all NHS organisations must adhere to. We have put in place technology and security policies, rules and measures to protect your information.
Sometimes we may need to share information about you with other agencies so we can all work together for your benefit. We will only ever use or pass on information about you if others involved in your care have a genuine need for it. Anyone who receives information from us is also under a legal duty to keep it confidential and secure.
Dental Referrals will only use information given to us in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations. We have a legal duty to keep all information supplied by service users confidential. As a confidential service we will ask service users for their permission if we must contact other agencies, except where there are significant issues of risk such as child protection issues or harm to self or others. Anyone who receives information from us is also under a legal duty to keep it confidential.
The General Data Protection Regulations allows you to find out what information about you is held in our records. This applies to both manual and computer processed records. This is known as ‘Subject Access Request‘. If you want to see information on your dental referrals then you can find our how to do this here. Under the new regulations there is no charge for us to supply this information to you. If you are interested in Freedom of Information requests, you can learn more about these here.
Its important to note that we don’t hold your dental records just information that your dentist has provided to refer you to other services.
When requesting your personal information from us, you should include the following information:
You also have the right to ask about any logic involved in any automated decisions made about you. The dental referral service does not use any automated decision making processes in how you access care.
Please email this information to us using our secure email – d.referrals@nhs.net or you can post it to us at the address below. Please tell us how you would like us to send the information to you – using email or post. Both carry risks, so consider who else may have access your email or your post.
Subject Access Request Manager
Dental Referral Management Centre
6 The Offices, Stannian Fold,
Lymm, Warrington
WA13 9AB
If you would like to know more about how we use your information, your rights under the General Data Protection Regulations, or if you would like to limit your information being used in this way, you can contact us at d.referrals@nhs.net or speak to your local patient experience team at www.pals.nhs.uk
