Recordings and notes from your consultations – your informed consent (Nutrition clinic)

This information sheet gives you details of the information we take from you during your consultations, and how we use this. It also sets out details of our clinical audit process, and how we use this. We ask you to read this so you can give your informed consent to our use of your personal data.

This Data Processing Agreement was last reviewed in June 2023. This appendix to the main NCA policies (located at https://nca.ac.uk/the-college/college-policies/data-protection-policy) describes how this personal data will be collected, handled and stored. 

Video-recording your consultation

We video-record your consultations and keep these recordings securely for 10 years. This recording of your consultations may be used for the following purposes:

• To allow students to watch and understand themselves and each other in the consultation, to improve their own clinical practice and relationship management skills;
• To aid teaching and learning of current and future students;
• To enable a smoother handover of clients between student practitioners, should this be necessary;
• For research purposes. By ‘research’, we mean our own in-house audit purposes, and students’ own research including their MSc research project, which may lead to publication. In research, all identifying details of yourself and the student practitioners are entirely and completely unidentifiable (students transcribe and pseudonymise the recordings, which means they give you a code rather than your actual name, and the actual recordings will not be made available to anyone outside the College).

These uses are collectively referred to as “teaching, assessment and research purposes”.

How do we store and access the video recordings?

We store recordings for 10 years from the date on which they are recorded, 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.

All students on our Nutrition Science & Practice course, together with teaching and directorial staff on that course, our research staff and some College administrative staff, have access to the recordings over this 10-year storage period. They may access the recordings remotely (i.e., when they are not in the College building).

All our students and staff are bound by very strict requirements on absolute confidentiality. We require students to sign an agreement at the start of their course that governs the conditions under which they can access the recordings: for example, they are forbidden to access the recordings unless they are alone in a room; they must wear headphones at all times; they must clear the screen if they leave the room at all. Students and staff members share a collective responsibility to observe, and to report any infringement of, the rules under which access is permitted. Any student or staff member found to be breaching these rules may face the most serious penalties that the College may exact, including immediate and permanent suspension from their course or their employment with the College.

By these precautions we believe we have eliminated everything except the most minimal risk to your confidentiality, but we cannot entirely eliminate the very small remaining risk.

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. These notes are stored for 10 years, which complies with the guidance set out by our professional body, the British Association of Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine (BANT), and adds an extra two years for research purposes, which is standard in healthcare research.

Do I have to give my consent?

We are an educational charity and it is a condition of our teaching clinic, which offers high-quality nutritional therapy at low cost, that we record, store and use your data for teaching, assessment and research purposes in this way. If you do not feel able to consent to this, we recognise and respect your wishes, but we will be unable to offer you a course of nutritional therapy.

Clinical audit

We collect data on your progress using a questionnaire called MYMOP (Measure Yourself Medical Outcomes Profile). It collects information about one or two of your symptoms, any activities that are made difficult by those symptoms, and your general wellbeing. We will also ask you for some information about your age and your ethnicity. Your practitioner will support you to complete the questionnaires as part of your appointments.

We analyse this data internally, in an anonymised form, to understand how our clients progress. We also share this data, entirely anonymously, with the organisation that owns the MYMOP questionnaire, called Meaningful Measures. Meaningful Measures will not share your data with any third parties – it is only for their internal analysis. The anonymised data we share with them may be used to publish reports or scientific papers to help share the aggregated findings with the research community to bring more attention to the unmet needs in the population. Any 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 anonymised data to create coding frameworks that provide a scientifically rigorous approach to analysing the MYMOP data 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 data share with Meaningful Measures: https://bit.ly/3hWKuVe

What do I have to do?

We ask for your consent to these activities at the time of your booking, via a tick-box in your Client Details intake form. You do not have to do anything else to consent to our storage and use of your notes and your recordings.

If you have any questions at all about the information in this form, we will be very happy to answer your questions. Please call us on 01904 343305.