A patient's bill of rights is a list of guarantees for those receiving medical care. It may take the form of a law or a non-binding declaration. Typically a patient's bill of rights guarantees patients information, fair treatment, and autonomy over medical decisions, among other rights.
Confidentiality involves a set of rules or a promise usually executed through confidentiality agreements that limits access or places restrictions on certain types of information.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is a department of Her Majesty's Government, responsible for government policy on health and adult social care matters in England, along with a few elements of the same matters which are not otherwise devolved to the Scottish Government, Welsh Government or Northern Ireland Executive. It oversees the English National Health Service (NHS). The department is led by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care with two Ministers of State and three Parliamentary Under-Secretaries of State.
Medical privacy or health privacy is the practice of maintaining the security and confidentiality of patient records. It involves both the conversational discretion of health care providers and the security of medical records. The terms can also refer to the physical privacy of patients from other patients and providers while in a medical facility. Modern concerns include the degree of disclosure to insurance companies, employers, and other third parties. The advent of electronic medical records (EMR) and patient care management systems (PCMS) have raised new concerns about privacy, balanced with efforts to reduce duplication of services and medical errors.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department of Health in the United Kingdom, which publishes guidelines in four areas:
The terms medical record, health record, and medical chart are used somewhat interchangeably to describe the systematic documentation of a single patient's medical history and care across time within one particular health care provider's jurisdiction. The medical record includes a variety of types of "notes" entered over time by health care professionals, recording observations and administration of drugs and therapies, orders for the administration of drugs and therapies, test results, x-rays, reports, etc. The maintenance of complete and accurate medical records is a requirement of health care providers and is generally enforced as a licensing or certification prerequisite.
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that as of 2011 defines the fundamental structure and authority for the encouragement, regulation and enforcement of workplace health, safety and welfare within the United Kingdom.
NHS Scotland, sometimes styled NHSScotland, is the publicly funded healthcare system in Scotland. It operates 14 territorial NHS Boards across Scotland, seven special non-geographic health boards and NHS Health Scotland.
Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland (HSC) is the designation of the publicly funded service which provides public health and other social care services in Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Executive through its Department of Health is responsible for its funding, while the Public Health Agency is the executive agency responsible for the provision of health and social care services across Northern Ireland. It is free of charge to all citizens of Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom.
Dame Fiona Caldicott, is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist and, previously, Principal of Somerville College, Oxford.
Community health councils were established in 1974 to provide a voice for patients and the public in the National Health Service (NHS) in England and Wales.
The Caldicott Committee's Report on the Review of Patient-Identifiable Information, usually referred to as the Caldicott Report was a review commissioned in 1997 by the Chief Medical Officer of England due to increasing worries concerning the use of patient information in the National Health Service (NHS) in England and Wales and the need to avoid the undermining of confidentiality because of the development of information technology in the NHS, and its ability to propagate information concerning patients in a rapid and extensive way.
Dame Joan Margaret Higgins, DBE FAcSS is a British academic and educator.
The Mental Health Act Commission was an NHS special health authority that provided a safeguard for people detained in hospital under the powers of the Mental Health Act 1983 in England and Wales. Mental health care is the only part of health care where patients can be treated under compulsion, and necessarily there are very clear legal requirements on hospitals and the other services involved - primarily local authority social services. The Commission was abolished on 31 March 2009.
The NHS Constitution for England is a document that sets out the objectives of the National Health Service, the rights and responsibilities of the various parties involved in health care, and the guiding principles which govern the service. First published on 21 January 2009 it was one of a number of recommendations in Lord Darzi’s report ‘High Quality Care for All’ as part of a ten-year plan to provide the highest quality of care and service for patients in England. Previously these rights and responsibilities had evolved in common law or through English or EU law, or were policy pledges by the NHS and UK government have been written into the document. It can be seen as a development of the ideas that began with the introduction of the Patient's Charter in 1991.
Medical states or medical conditions are used to describe a patient's condition in a hospital. These general terms are most commonly used in information given to the news media, and are rarely used as clinical descriptions by physicians, who in their daily business describe medical problems more precisely.
The Health and Social Care Act 2012 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It provides for the most extensive reorganisation of the structure of the National Health Service in England to date. It removed responsibility for the health of citizens from the Secretary of State for Health, which the post had carried since the inception of the NHS in 1948. It abolished NHS primary care trusts (PCTs) and Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs) and transferred between £60 billion and £80 billion of "commissioning", or health care funds, from the abolished PCTs to several hundred "clinical commissioning groups", partly run by the general practitioners (GPs) in England but a major point of access for private service providers. A new executive agency of the Department of Health, Public Health England, was established under the Act on 1 April 2013.
care.data was a programme announced by the then Health and Social Care Information Centre in Spring 2013. It aimed to extract data from GP surgeries into a central database through the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES). Members of the English population who were registered with GP practices were informed that data on their health would be uploaded to HSCIC unless they exercised their rights to object by informing their GP.
The National Data Guardian for Health and Social Care is an independent, non-regulatory, advice giving body in England sponsored by the Department of Health and Social Care. Dame Fiona Caldicott has held the position since its inauguration in November 2014.
