Social Care Digital Pathfinder

Delayed transfers of care and reduced admission

In order to comply with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), where personal data relating to a data subject is collected, Lancashire County Council would like to provide you with the following details.

Identity and contact details of the data controller

Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ

Contact details of the data protection officer

Our Data Protection Officer is Paul Bond. You can contact him at dpo@lancashire.gov.uk or Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ

Purposes for processing

The implementation of the Social Care Digital Pathfinder will support effective discharge of patients requiring support from social care services on discharge from Acute hospitals by exchanging data captured in Assessment, Discharge and Withdrawal Notices across health and social care.

Using systems to capture and directly import structured data between systems will improve the accuracy, efficiency and reliability to support the hospital discharge process. Early work with local areas has shown that the approach streamlines the discharge process which improves the patient experience and delivers patient flow benefits to both the NHS and Social Care. For our service users and patients it will ensure that the provisions necessary for their care are put in place in a timely fashion.

The service also provides greater clarity and control by ensuring that information sent is safely, securely, lawfully and transparently.

The data will be exchanged electronically from the hospital Electronic Patient Record System (EPR), via the region's Health Information Exchange (HIE) known locally as the Lancashire Person Record Exchange Service (LPRES), and directly imported into the appropriate local authority social care case recording system (within this project these are identified as Liquidlogic Adults System and Servelec Mosaic).

Where no EPR exists for patients being cared for in an acute setting, patient data captured in other systems or handwritten and identified as required in the data specification will be digitised to enable the exchange via LPRES to happen.

The local authority is able to accept or reject Notices, by sending a Notice Receipt to the hospital.

Category of personal data being processed

Personal data (information relating to a living, identifiable individual)
Special category personal data (racial, ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person's sex life or sexual orientation)

Legal basis for processing personal data

The legal basis for processing your personal data, in accordance with the UK GDPR is:

(e) Public Task: the processing is necessary for you to perform a task in the public interest or for your official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law. You must reference the applicable task/function and its' basis in law if you wish to rely on this basis for processing.

The public task carried out in accordance with UK GDPR Article 6 (1) (e) is carried out by virtue of the following legislation:

Care Act 2014
Care and Support (Discharge of Hospital Patients) Regulations 2014

The Care Act 2014 has made it a statutory requirement for NHS bodies to send information to Local Authorities when a patient is admitted and requires care and support on discharge, send information ahead of the patient being discharged and where there is a change in circumstances, removing the need for assessment (known as Assessment, Discharge and Withdrawal notices). NHS Digital has published an information standard which specifies the minimum information that must be shared electronically as part of that process. This is in line with the Care and Support (Discharge of Hospital Patients) Regulations 2014.

NHS Digital has been working with a number of NHS Trusts, Local Authorities and system suppliers to introduce technology that will enable this information to be sent more efficiently. This work has been taken forward under the Personalised Health and Care 2020 programme with the aim of making better use of digital technologies and data across health and care.

Legal basis for processing special categories of personal data

The legal basis for processing your special categories of personal data, in accordance with the UK GDPR is:

(h) Processing is necessary for the purposes of preventive or occupational medicine, for the assessment of the working capacity of the employee, medical diagnosis, the provision of health or social care or treatment or the management of health or social care systems and services.

Recipients of the data

Patient data as identified below and required for the purposes of Assessment and Discharge will be collected in the following hospitals:

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (who were partners in the original Digital Discharging project and who will continue with Pathfinder)
University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust
East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust

Personal data will be processed securely by third party providers to facilitate the personal data sharing via the LPRES platform.

The information will then be shared with the relevant local authority responsible for the provision of social care on discharge; the authorities within scope of this agreement are:

Lancashire County Council
Cumbria County Council
Blackburn with Darwen Unitary Authority
Blackpool Unitary Authority

Information we share

Assessment Notice Issued Date and Time
Patient NHS Number
Patient Number Status Indicator
Hospital Patient Identifier
Patient Name
Family Name
Patients' First Given Name
Patient Birth Date
Patient Stated Gender
Patient Address
Patient Contact Details
Patient Email Address
Patient Telephone Number
Patient Language Details
Patient Preferred Language
Interpreter Required Indicator
Hospital
Hospital Organisation Site Code
Hospital Name
Ward Name
Admission Date
Reason For Admission
Admission Type
Proposed Discharge Date
Lead Clinician Name
Hospital Liaison Name
Hospital Liaison Email Address
Hospital Liaison Telephone Number
Patients' Carers Name
Patients' Carers Family Name
Patients' Carers First Given Name
Carer Contact Details
Carer Email Address
Carer Telephone Number Assessment Notice Consultation Status
Assessment Notice Patient Consultation Indicator
Assessment Notice Carer Consultation Indicator
Assessment Notice Consent Status
NHS CHC Assessment
Safeguarding Indicator
Local Authority Name
Local Authority Code
Social Services Team
Hospital Liaison Name
Hospital Liaison Email Address
Hospital Liaison Telephone Number
Patients' Carers Name
Patients' Carers Family Name
Patients' Carers First Given Name
Carer Contact Details
Carer Email Address
Carer Telephone Number
Assessment Notice Consultation Status
Assessment Notice Patient Consultation Indicator
Assessment Notice Carer Consultation Indicator
Assessment Notice Consent Status
NHS CHC Assessment
Safeguarding Indicator
Local Authority Name
Local Authority Code
Social Services Team

Any transfers to another country

Retention periods

Lancashire County Council will only store your information for as long as is legally required or in situations where there is no legal retention period they will follow established best practice.

File type	Description	Security	Retention period
Electronic social care	Demographic and Contact information imported from data exchanged in Assessment, Discharge and Withdrawal Notices during the discharge process and used further and as necessary to provision social care support on discharge.	Information will be securely held by LCC on a dedicated social care case management system.	Retention and disposal periods for all records held within the county council's social care case recording system are determined by client category. Records for clients with a category of elderly, physically disabled, or those with a learning disability are retained for 3 years after death or after the case has been closed. Records for clients with a category of mental health are retained for periods of between 5 years from the date the services cease, to 20 years after no further treatment is considered necessary in line with the Mental Health Act and NHS Code of Good Practice.

Your rights

You have certain rights under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), these are the right:

to be informed via Privacy Notices such as this.
to withdraw your consent. If we are relying on your consent to process your data then you can remove this at any point.
of access to any personal information the council holds about yourself. To request a copy of this information you must make a subject access request in writing. You are entitled to receive a copy of your personal data within 1 calendar month of our receipt of your subject access request. If your request is complex then we can extend this period by a further two months, if we need to do this we will contact you. You can request a subject access request, either via a letter or via an email to Information Governance Team, address below.
of rectification, we must correct inaccurate or incomplete data within one month.
to erasure. You have the right to have your personal data erased and to prevent processing unless we have a legal obligation to process your personal information.
to restrict processing. You have the right to suppress processing. We can retain just enough information about you to ensure that the restriction is respected in future.
to data portability. We can provide you with your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine readable form when asked.
to object. You can object to your personal data being used for profiling, direct marketing or research purposes.
in relation to automated decision making and profiling, to reduce the risk that a potentially damaging decision is taken without human intervention.

If you want to exercise any of these rights then you can do so by contacting:

Information Governance Team
Lancashire County Council
PO Box 78
County Hall
Preston
PR1 8XJ

Or email: dpo@lancashire.gov.uk

To ensure that we can deal with your request as efficiently as possible you will need to include your current name and address, proof of identity (a copy of your driving licence, passport or two different utility bills that display your name and address), as much detail as possible regarding your request so that we can identify any information we may hold about you, this may include your previous name and address, date of birth and what council service you were involved with.

Further information

If you would like more information about this specific service then please contact Tracey Boswell, Tracey.Boswell@lancashire.gov.uk.

For more information about how we use personal information see Lancashire County Council's full privacy notice.

If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact the Information Governance team who will investigate the matter.

Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ or email: dataprotection@lancashire.gov.uk

If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data not in accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).