We are committed to protecting the privacy of all individuals using this website.
This policy explains how we use any personal information we collect from you through http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk.
You can access many of the pages on the NHS Direct website without giving us your personal information. However, you may choose to provide us with your personal information on some pages of the website.
For example when you:
The information we collect through the enquiry form may include information relating to your physical or mental health. When you submit personal information, you consent to our use of the information as set out in this privacy policy.
In addition to the above, we request some personal information in our online health and symptom checkers. This includes:
We ask for the first part of your postcode or the name of your town so that we can tailor our NHS Direct services to your region.
We ask for your gender and date or birth so that we can tailor our questions to take into account age and gender. This information is kept anonymous.
We do not use Facebook 'Like' buttons on the NHS Direct website and, therefore, we do not share any user information with Facebook.
We shall use any personal information you give to us in accordance with this policy, and with any additional statements appearing on forms used for submitting your personal information. We shall not disclose your personal information to any third parties without obtaining your prior consent unless we are required by law to do so. In particular:
If you submit an enquiry: we shall use your personal information to administer and respond to your enquiry. Your enquiry will be researched by our information team, who will respond to you. We shall securely store the information you supply and the response we provide. We may produce reports on the use of the enquiry service to enable us to monitor and develop it. These reports will be based on anonymous data, which means that individuals will not be identified in the reports.
If you request to receive a newsletter: we shall use your personal information to send it to you by email. If at any time you wish to stop receiving it, please click on the link at the end of the newsletter. Your details will be removed from our database.
If you use an online patient decision aid: each decision aid allows you to create a personal record of your journey by building a summary of the pages you visit and your answers to all the questions asked. This summary will be available to your health professional and used when discussing your treatment preferences with them.
If you contact us regarding the website: we shall use your details to reply to you. We try to respond to all feedback where a valid email address is included. If you make a comment or complaint about other aspects of the service, such as the call centre, we may use your details to investigate your comments.
With your permission, academic institutions may occasionally use our data in relevant studies. In these instances, we shall inform you in advance and you will have the choice to opt out of the study. The information that is used will be made anonymous and will be confidential.
All data obtained by NHS Direct is held and used in compliance with the Data Protection Act 1998.
This website uses cookies. A cookie is a piece of data that may be stored on your computer when you visit a website. When you visit our website, our server will record your computer's IP address (the unique numerical address given to every computer connected to the internet) and the time and duration of your visit. Our website will also store a cookie on your computer.
This cookie and your IP address will be used to record the pages you visit on our website. We will use this information to analyse the way our site is used, and to administer and improve the accessibility of our site.
Cookies also enable the website to remember the answers you have given to the questions asked by an online health and symptom checker. This ensures that the advice offered is correctly matched to the symptoms you may have. As they are interactive, the health and symptom checkers need to use cookies to work.
We will not use information from cookies for any other purpose than those outlined above. NHS Direct will not use cookies or IP addresses to identify individuals.
You may disable the use of cookies in your Internet browser but this may affect your use of some features of this website as outlined above.
Find out more about cookies and the types of cookies we use.
For more information on cookies visit: www.allaboutcookies.org.
If you have a health related query or are concerned about symptoms you may have, but do not want our website to use cookies to store information on your device, you can call our telephone helpline service by dialling 111 for health related advice. We are available to take your call 24-hours a day, every day. Calls to NHS 111 cost around 5p/min from a BT landline but charges from other network providers may vary.
The search engine on this website is designed to be as effective and simple to use as the popular search engine Google. In order to achieve this, we use a piece of hardware (a search ‘appliance’) supplied by Google that is connected to our web server. It constantly searches and indexes the content on our site. All search requests entered into the NHS Direct website are handled by the Google search appliance and this information is not passed on to any third party, including Google.
This website contains links to other sites.
We are not responsible for the privacy practices of third parties that run any other websites. Please refer to their own privacy policies for more information.
You have a right under the Data Protection Act 1998 to ask us to provide you with the information we hold about you and to have any inaccuracies corrected.
If you would like to access a copy of your information, please contact the Data Protection Officer using the following contact details:
Data Protection Officer
NHS Direct
120 Leman Street
London
E1 8EU
Telephone: 020 7599 4200
You can also submit an enquiry using contact us.
Further details about your rights under the Data Protection Act can be accessed on the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) website.
This website is operated by NHS Direct. If you have any queries relating to this policy, please contact us.
