Privacy Act
Personal Information Management Policy
1. Introduction
The Mater Hospital Mackay respects and upholds your rights to privacy protection under the National Privacy Principles contained in the Privacy Act 1988. The National Privacy Principles apply to us from their introduction on 21 December 2001.
The policy describes how we manage any personal information we have about you.
2. What personal information about you does the Mater Hospital Mackay hold?
Name, address, telephone number(s)
Date of birth
Email address
Occupation
Health Information
General Practitioner
Referring Doctor
Returned Service Organisation
Religious beliefs or affiliations
Transaction details associated with services we have provided to you
Any additional information provided to us by you
Any information you provided to us through patient surveys
The Mater Hospital Mackay will destroy or de-identify personal information due to redundancy after its legal obligations to retain the information have expired.
3. What does the Mater Hospital Mackay do with your personal information?
We use personal information about you:
to provide medical treatment and care to you;
to assist your treating doctors; nursing staff and other allied health professionals in providing medical treatment and care to
you
at our facilities;
to assist with any calls you make to us; for our internal administrative requirements;
to process private health fund claims;
to provide information to medical practitioners, registered nurses and other allied health professionals who provide
necessary follow-up treatment and ongoing care.
For benchmarking and clinical indicator reporting in a de-identified form;
To provide data in both identified and de-identified form to state government agencies in compliance with
numerous
legislative requirements;
To provide data in a de-identified form to the Private Hospital Data Bureau.
And with your consent:
To communicate promotional offers and special events;
fundraising;
marketing;
service planning;
research and development.
The Mater Hospital Mackay will not disclose personal information about you to any person except on a confidential basis
to agents that we use in the ordinary operation of our business, such as for data processing, printing or mailing.
You may at any time opt out of receiving any communications from us (other than as required for the operation of our
business, eg regarding payment of your account).
4. Storage - The Mater Hospital Mackay stores personal information:
a. Contained in paper based and other hard copy
documents in a dedicated storage facility located in the hospital.
b. Contained in electronic records in a secure environment,
and
Such records are only accessible by those persons who
require access to the personal information for the purpose of
carrying out their employment.
5. Openness
You may request access to personal information we hold about you by writing to the Director of Nursing at the address below. You do not have to provide a reason for requesting access. Where we hold information that you are entitled to access, we will endeavour to provide you with a suitable range of choices as to how you may access it (eg post or collection).
If you believe that personal information we hold about you
is incorrect, incomplete or inaccurate, then you may request
amendment of it. We will consider if the information requires amendment. If we do not agree that there are grounds for
amendment, then we will add a note to the personal information stating
that you disagree with it.
Any questions about this policy, or any complaint regarding treatment of your privacy by Mater Hospital Mackay, should also be made in writing to the address below.
Our contact details are as follows:
Director of Nursing
Mater Misericordiae Hospital
P O Box 214
Mackay Qld 4740
Phone: (07) 49 655 426
Fax: (07) 49 655 600
Email: (matermackay@mercycq.com)
6. Miscellaneous
In this policy 'personal information' and 'health
information' have the same meaning as contained in the Privacy Act.
References to the Mater Hospital Mackay are to Mercy Health and Aged Care
Central Queensland Limited.
(CAN 096 724 033), which has issued this policy.
This document represents our policy as at 19 December 2001. We may change this policy from time to time. Although we intend to observe this policy at all times, it is not legally binding on the Mater Hospital Mackay in any way. From time to time we may regard it as necessary or desirable to act outside this policy. The Mater Hospital Mackay may do so, subject only to any statutory rights you have under the Privacy Act or the other applicable legislation.
