The London borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) complies with the Data Protection Act 1998 and is registered as a Data Controller (Reg. No. Z7517364).

The council exists to provide a wide range of services. This can only be done by collecting and using the appropriate personal information which is collected either in person, over the phone or via the forms on our website.

When contacting us, you may be asked for personal information such as name, address, postcode etc.

Why we collect your information

Information may be collected:

• to fulfil your request for information or services;
• as input to improving our site; or
• as part of the process of consultation.

It will only be used in those activities necessary to provide you with the service you have requested or require.

Any information provided via the comments/compliments/complaints area of the website will be used for the purposes which we reasonably believe it was provided for.

You will be advised of any additional purposes or uses at the time the information is collected.

In addition to the purposes which we have stated when we collected the information, it will also be processed in line with those purposes which we have identified on our Data Protection Notification which is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office. We may also use information for those purposes required by law.

How your data is used

Information which you have provided the council will be stored securely. It will be used for the purposes stated when the information was collected.

Information will not be sold, rented or provided to anyone else, or used for any other purpose than that for which it was originally collected unless required to by law.

We are required under Section 6 of the Audit Commission Act 1998 to participate in the National Fraud Initiative data matching exercise. The data held will be used for cross-system and cross authority comparison for the prevention and detection of fraud.

Since April 2013, The Health and Social Care Act 2012 has given local authorities the power to perform public health functions.

This means that the council has “A duty to improve the health of the people and responsibility for commissioning appropriate public health services” and the statutory responsibilities for public health services are clearly set out in the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

You have the right to opt out of The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham receiving or holding your personal identifiable information.

There are occasions where service providers will have a legal duty to share information, for example for safeguarding or criminal issues.

The process for opting out will depend on the specific data and what programme it relates to.

Health and Social Care Act 2012

To deliver the public health function, local authorities need to use available health data sources to get relevant health and social care information.

This data can contain person identifiable data (PID) which may identify patients such as name, address, age, sex, ethnicity, disease, use of hospital services, and/or NHS number.

Some data may not be obviously identifiable, however there may be the potential to deduce individuals’ identities through combinations of information, either by the people handling the data or by those who see published results.

The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham will have access to the following data:

• Primary Care Mortality Database (PCMD) – The PCMD holds mortality data as provided at the time of registration of the death along with additional GP details, geographical indexing and coroner details where applicable
• Births and Vital Statistics datasets  – Births files include date of birth, sex, birthweight, address, postcode, place of birth, stillbirth indicators and age of mother. Deaths data includes: deaths broken down by age, sex, area and cause of death sourced from the deaths register
• Hospital Episode Data (HES) – is a data warehouse containing details of all admissions, outpatient appointments and A&E attendances at NHS hospitals in England. This data is collected during a patient’s time at hospital and is submitted to allow hospitals to be paid for the care they deliver. HES data is designed to enable secondary use, that is use for non-clinical purposes, of this administrative data

The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham’s Public Health service will access health and related information to analyse the health needs and outcomes of the local population and for monitoring trends and patterns of diseases and the associated risk factors.

The Public Health team is, however, committed to using pseudonymised or anonymised information as much as is practical, and in many cases this will be the default position.

Pseudonymisation is a procedure by which the most identifying fields within a data record are replaced by one or more artificial identifiers, or pseudonyms.

There can be a single pseudonym for a collection of replaced fields or a pseudonym per replaced field.

The purpose is to render the data record less identifying and therefore lower customer or patient objections to its use.

Anonymisation is the process of removing identifying particulars or details for statistical or other purposes.

All information accessed, processed, and stored by public health staff will be used to measure the health, mortality or care needs of the population; for planning, evaluating and monitoring health; protecting and improving public health.

It is used to carry out and support:

• health needs assessments
• health equity analysis
• commissioning and delivery of services to promote health and prevent ill health
• public health surveillance
• identifying inequalities in the way people access services
• joint strategic needs assessment
• health protection and other partnership activities

Any information held by the council about individuals will be held securely and in compliance with the Data Protection Act 1998. Information will not be held for longer than required and will be disposed of securely.

The legal basis for the flow of data for the above purposes is set out in Section 42(4) of the Statistics and Registration Service Act (2007) as amended by section 287 of the Health and Social Care Act (2012) and Regulation 3 of the Health Service (Control of Patient Information) Regulations 2002.

Information security

Health related data is accessed over an N3 connection, the secure national broadband network for the NHS.

Any data extracts and analysis are saved in the confidential data library storage areas for Public Health Analysts which has restricted access controls.