Purposes for processing

NHS England is testing a new service in community pharmacies to offer people a consultation service for people who have attended urgent or emergency care with a minor illness or who need an urgent repeat prescription.  Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit (part of NHS England) are working with NHS England to evaluate this new   service in local community pharmacies.  The pilot aims to understand what works well, and less well and, if necessary, how it might be improved in the future.

Sources of data and categories of personal data

In order to find out if this new service is working well, we will need to process information about you.  Most of this information will be collected by the pharmacist when providing you with the service and shared with to Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit which is part of NHS England (see below).  This will include information about your consultation but no information that identifies you.

We will also ask you take part in a very short text message survey after your consultation with the pharmacist so you can tell us about your experience of this service. We may also ask you take part in a telephone interview.

Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit (part of NHS England) are carrying out this evaluation on behalf of NHS England. Their privacy policy can be found on their website.

How will NHS England use any personal data including your responses?

NHS England will use your personal data and responses solely for evaluation purposes and to produce findings and insights for NHS England in relation to this new service.

If you agree, we may use your mobile phone survey to send you a customer satisfaction survey by text and we may also contact you with a request to undertake a telephone interview.  If you do take part in a telephone interview at a later date, your answers will be collected using digital recorders, note-taking, and in some cases, the sound files will be used to produce transcripts. The sound files will be destroyed as soon as the transcripts have been undertaken.

How long will NHS England retain my personal data and identifiable responses?

NHS England will only retain your personal data in a way that can identify you for as long as is necessary to complete the evaluation.  In practice, this means that once we have satisfactorily reported the anonymous research findings to NHS England, we will securely remove your personal, identifying data from our systems.

For this project we will securely remove your personal data from our systems by 31st December 2023 which is the end of the pilot.

Legal basis for processing

For GDPR purposes NHS England’s lawful basis for processing is Article 6(1)(e) – ‘…exercise of official authority…’;

For the processing of special categories (health) data the basis is 9(2)(h) – ‘…health or social care…’