Recordings and notes from your consultations – your informed consent (Herbs clinic)
This page gives you details of the information we take from you during your consultations, and how we use this.
Please note that your informed consent is required for most aspects below should you wish to have treatment in our herbs teaching clinic. If you are uncertain about this please call us on 01904 343305 to discuss any concerns. If you prefer to see a private practitioner instead, we can offer information on how to go about finding one.
Use of notes taken during your consultations
During your consultations, your student practitioner and the Clinic Supervisor will take written notes to record the information you give them, along with details of herbal medicine prescribed for you. We store these notes for at least 8 years following the end of your treatment at the NCA Chinese Herbal Medicine clinic.
As this is a teaching clinic, students may draw from the information you give as a patient for their assignments and research, including MSc research projects, only once all identifying details are removed. During such research, your information may be viewed, again only once all identifying details are removed, by academic supervisors and assessors, who are under a duty of confidentiality. Research may be published in professional journals, though again, only once all identifying details are removed, so you will not be identifiable in any publications.
The Office for Students (the regulatory body for all English higher education, which reports to Parliament through the Department for Education) requires that we retain all student assessments for 5 years and this includes some assessments where your information may be drawn on, again only once all identifying details are removed.
If students draw on any part of your information within an MSc research project, this will only be once all identifying details are removed and the retention period will be longer - up to 10 years - in accordance with accepted practice in higher education research.
Use of your information to understand our effectiveness
We collect information on your progress during treatment using a questionnaire called MYMOP (Measure Yourself Medical Outcomes Profile). We ask you to rate one or two of your symptoms, any activities that are made difficult by those symptoms, and your general wellbeing at several points during your treatment. We will also ask you for some information about your age and your ethnicity. Identifying details (name and date of birth) are not collected with this.
We analyse this information internally, to understand how our patients progress. We also share this information, without any identifying details, with the organisation that owns the MYMOP questionnaire, called Meaningful Measures. Meaningful Measures will not share your information with any third parties – it is solely for their internal analysis. The information we share with them may be used, along with information from other people using MYMOP, to publish reports or scientific papers to help share the aggregated findings with the research community. Published findings do not refer to individual concerns, symptoms or activities, but describe broad categories. Neither will any organisations be identified in the reports or scientific papers, without prior consent. Meaningful Measures also use the information to create coding frameworks that provide a scientifically rigorous approach to analysing the MYMOP information for its customers (i.e., the clinics that use MYMOP). Again, no individuals or organisations are named in these frameworks. Please see the following weblink for more details about the information shared with Meaningful Measures: https://bit.ly/3hWKuVe
If you have any questions at all about the information in the MYMOP form, we will be very happy to answer your questions. Please call us on 01904 343305.
What do I have to do?
We require your consent to the above activities at the time of your booking, via a tick-box on our Patient Details and Informed Consent form. You do not have to do anything else to consent to our storage and use of the above information.
Video-recording your consultation (your consent to this is optional and we only do this exceptionally)
There may be occasions when it would be most helpful to our students and their learning process if you would allow us to keep a video recording of your consultation(s). If you consent to this we would keep this recording securely for either 30 days or 10 years, according to your choice. The recording of your consultation may be used for the following purposes:
(If you allow us to keep your recording for 30 days): To allow students to watch and understand themselves and each other in the consultation, to improve their own clinical practice and relationship management skills;
(If you allow us to keep your recording for 30 days): To aid teaching and learning of current students;
(If you allow us to keep your recording for 10 years): To enable a smoother handover of clients between student practitioners, should this be necessary;
(If you allow us to keep your recording for 10 years): For research purposes. By ‘research’, we mean our own in-house purposes, and students’ own research including their MSc research project, which may lead to publication in professional journals. In research, all identifying details of yourself and the student practitioners are entirely and completely anonymised (students transcribe and anonymise relevant information from the recordings, and the actual recordings will not be made available to anyone outside the College).
How do we store and access video recordings?
We store recordings for either 30 days or 10 years from the date on which they are recorded (you can choose which period), after which they are securely destroyed. We store them on an internet server which is compliant with the General Data Protection Regulations legislation, and which offers a very high level of security against unauthorised access.
During your chosen period of storage, these recordings may be accessed by students on our Chinese Herbal Medicine course, together with staff who teach and supervise on the course, our research staff and some College administrative staff.
All our students and staff are bound by very strict requirements on absolute confidentiality.
