Privacy Policy - St Luke's Care

1. INTRODUCTION

St Luke’s Care, a provider of Hospital, Residential Aged Care, Community Care, Flexible Care and Retirement services, respects and upholds your rights to privacy protection under the applicable privacy legislation.

This policy describes how we manage any personal information we have about you.

2. WHAT PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT ME DOES ST LUKE’S CARE HOLD?

St Luke’s Care may hold the following information about you, depending on the type of care it provides to you:

name
date of birth
address and telephone contact
email address
occupation
health information
social circumstances information
general practitioner
referring doctor
next of kin/responsible person
Medicare details
health fund or insurer information
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 customer satisfaction surveys

St Luke’s Care is required by regulation to keep some personal information for extended periods. It will destroy or de-identify personal information which is not required after its legal obligations to retain the information have expired.

3. HOW DO WE COLLECT PERSONAL INFORMATION?

St Luke’s Care collects personal information about you, from the following sources and depending on the type of care it provides to you:

Directly from you
From allied health professionals
From your nominated representatives
From Government Agencies

From information you supply us via our website.

4. WHAT DOES ST LUKE’S CARE DO WITH MY PERSONAL INFORMATION?

We use personal information about you:

to provide health or aged care or retirement services to you;
to assist your treating doctors, nursing staff, first aid personnel, other allied health professionals and carers in providing health or aged care to you at our facilities or in the community while under our care;
where applicable, to discuss your care with your authorised representative or person responsible;
to provide information to suppliers of equipment or surgical supplies/implants (if receiving hospital care) necessary for your care;
to assist with any calls you make to us;
for our internal administrative requirements, including information required by our insurers and legal representatives;
to process accounts to government payers (aged care residential and community services) private health funds, insurers, or other persons/organisations nominated by you as responsible for your accounts and for billing or debt-recovery;
to provide information to medical practitioners, registered nurses, ambulance officers, other health professionals, community service providers and suppliers of aids, equipment, and appliances who provide necessary follow up treatment, services and ongoing care;
to provide data in both an identified and de-identified form to State and Commonwealth Government agencies in compliance with numerous legislative requirements;
to provide data in a de-identified form to the Private Hospital Data Bureau as required by law if hospital care has been provided;
for quality review, clinical audit, service-monitoring, planning, evaluation and accreditation activities;

We may also request specific consent from you to use your personal information:

for research and development.

As well as the uses of your personal information listed above, St Luke’s Care may provide your contact details to the St Luke’s Hospital Foundation, which is a charitable organisation that undertakes fund-raising work for St Luke’s Care. Any surplus generated by St Luke’s Foundation is used internally to help fund improvements and new services for medical and community needs. The Foundation may send you a newsletter or other information about the work it does. If you do not wish to receive this information, please contact the St Luke’s Care Privacy Officer through the main switchboard. Fundraising staff do not have access to your health information.

St Luke’s Care 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 and management, information technology support, 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, for example, regarding payment of your account).

5. STORAGE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

St Luke’s Care stores personal information:

a. contained in paper based and other hard copy documents in dedicated storage areas located at its care facilities, for records which are required to be retained and archived, in secure off-site storage; and

b. contained in electronic records in a secure environment within St Luke’s facilities, contained in electronic records in a secure environment with suppliers of our on-line web based technologies in accordance with relevant Privacy legislation; and such records are only accessible by those persons who require access to the personal information for the purpose of carrying out their employment or service responsibilities to St Luke’s Care.

6. ACCESS TO PERSONAL INFORMATION

You may request access to personal information we hold about you by writing to The Medical Records Administrator at the address below. 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 (e.g. 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.

7. QUESTIONS OR COMPLAINTS

If you have any questions about this policy or any complaint regarding treatment of your privacy by St Luke’s Care should be made in writing to the Chief Executive Officer at the address below.

Our contact details are as follows:
St Luke’s Care
18 Roslyn Street
Potts Point NSW 2011
Telephone: 02 9356 0200
Facsimile: 02 9357 2334
Email: enquiries@slc.org.au

Please note it is your right not to identify yourself in the complaint or to use a pseudonym.

If you are not satisfied with the way in which we handle your information or your privacy concerns, you may wish to make a formal complaint to the NSW Privacy Commissioner on (02) 9286 5588 or the Federal Privacy Commissioner on 1300 363 992.

8. WEBSITE USE

Our St Luke’s Care website may use cookies (i.e., small ‘bits’ of data sent from the St Luke’s Care server that allows it to identify and interact more effectively with an individual’s computer). This means that upon closing a browser, the cookie assigned to an individual’s computer or device may remain active to enhance their use of the website when they return to the website. Cookies do not identify individual users, but they do identify an individual’s ISP and their browser type.

Personal information such as email addresses are not collected from the website unless an individual provides it to St Luke’s Care. St Luke’s Care will not disclose domain names or aggregate information to third parties other than agents who assist us with our website and who are under obligations of confidentiality. Individuals can configure their browsers to accept or reject all cookies and to notify them when a cookie is used. Website users are encouraged to refer to their browser instructions or help screens to learn more about these functions.

St Luke’s Care may create links to third party websites. We are not responsible for the content or privacy practices employed by websites that are linked from our website.