Contacting You

When you register with us and give us your telephone number and email address (or whenever you wish to update your details), you are giving us permission to contact you for medical reasons, when you have a review due, or regarding an appointment you may have, etc. When sending or leaving messages, we will just say that we are trying to contact you so you may call us back at a more convenient time. We may send a text message to your mobile number if we are unable to get hold of you or leave a message. We may also pass on your contact details on to other NHS or NHS-affiliated services when referring you in order for them to make contact you. This is the minimum level of contact we must have in order to provide medical services to you.

If you have given us your email address, we will try to send your letters there instead of by post. They will be sent securely. You will be sent a message to say a letter is being held securely for you and will provide instructions on how you can collect it.

We may also contact you asking for your feedback on our services using questionnaires or surveys.

Patient Mailings

From time to time we need to send a message to lots of patients, for example during the ‘flu season. Sending mailings to large numbers of people is always very costly in both time and resources as we have to produce the lists of patients, print letters, fill envelopes and pay for postage. It doesn’t sound much until you have to do this for 20,000 letters!

To save time and money, we will try to contact you via text message or email in the first instance, then by telephone. If we are unable to contact you via these methods, we will send a letter. To help us manage large scale letter mailings, we may use a third party. The company used will have achieved compliance with all the requirements set out by the Department of Health regarding using/keeping/deleting data sent to it.

Information we send to the company will be encrypted and consists of the letter we want to send together with a list of names and addresses we want that letter to go to. No other information is given to the company. The company does not share the information with anyone else and deletes the data after 28 days.

If you have any questions, please ask to speak to a member of the Management Team.