Website of the Department of Health

Department of Health Information Charter

This Charter is for anyone who has dealings with the Department of Health whether through correspondence, involvement in consultations or collaborative policy development or if for any other reason we hold personal information about you.

In most cases personal information about users of health or social care services is held by the local providers of those services. Your rights in those circumstances or where DH holds personal health and care information to support the delivery of health and social care services, are assured by the NHS Care Records Guarantee (see link on the right hand side). 

We need to handle personal information about you so that we can provide services or work with you.

This is how we look after your information:

When we ask you for personal information, we promise:

• to make sure you know why we need it;
• to only ask for what we need, and not to collect too much or irrelevant information;
• to protect it and make sure nobody has access to it who shouldn’t;
• to let you know if we share it with other organisations to give you better public services - and if you can say no;
• to make sure we don’t keep it longer than necessary; and
• not to make your personal information available for commercial use without your permission.

In return, we ask you to:

• give us accurate information; and
• tell us as soon as possible if there are any changes, such as a new address.

This helps us to keep your information reliable and up to date.

You can get more details on:

• how to find out what information we hold about you and how to ask us to correct any mistakes (this information in this section of the website);
• agreements we have with other organisations for sharing information;
• circumstances where we can pass on your personal information without telling you, for example, to prevent and detect crime or to produce anonymised statistics;
• our instructions to staff on how to collect, use and delete your personal information;
• how we check the information we hold is accurate and up to date; and
• how to make a complaint.

• How to find out what information we hold about you and how to ask us to correct any mistakes
• Complaint procedures