Privacy notice - Trusted Assessor Service

Middlesbrough Council provides a service known as ‘trusted assessor’ to help with the discharge of patients from hospitals to care homes.

We collect ‘personal data’ including names, contact details including address, relationship, gender, date of birth, age, details about interests and social history, and identifiers such as NHS Patient Number. We collect ‘special category data’ including detailed health information about medical history and care needs, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. We also collect criminal convictions and offences data. We normally collect this information directly from patients or their relatives and carers, but we also collect information from other organisations such as health agencies, care homes, and social work teams. 

We use personal data and special category data where you have given your ‘consent’. If you are not capable of giving your consent, we may ask for it from someone who has ‘legal authority’ to do so.

If you or another person cannot legally give consent, the law allows us to use your personal data and special category where it is necessary to protect your ‘vital interests’.

We use criminal convictions and offences data to help us with our ‘legal obligations’. Some of the laws that require us to do so include the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Care Act 2014.

We use your data to assess your health, care, and other support needs for discharge from hospital to a care home. We use criminal convictions and offences data to help us to keep our staff healthy and safe and to protect you from any associated risks.

We share the information recorded in our assessment with the care home to make sure that they can meet your health, care, and other support needs. We also share your information with your Local Authority Adult Social Work Team to help them to meet their ‘legal obligations’ and to provide ‘health and social care’ under the same laws listed above.

If you live in Middlesbrough Borough, we record your information on our Adult Social Care system to share internally. If you live in North Yorkshire County, we send your information securely to North Yorkshire County Council. 

We use the following measures to ensure that your personal data is secure: data protection and security policies, information security incident reporting, data and device encryption, system and data access controls, user accounts and passwords, physical and environmental security, staff vetting practices, staff training and awareness, data back-ups, ICT network penetration testing, and business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Any data that we send or receive to other organisations is encrypted and protected.

We keep information about Middlesbrough residents for 8 years after we finish working with someone or after they die.

For North Yorkshire residents, from the day we receive the request to complete an assessment, we normally share your information with the care home and North Yorkshire County Council within a maximum of 3 days. Once we have completed that work, we will hold your data for a maximum of 90 days.

We do not send your personal data overseas.

We will never use your personal data for direct marketing.

Your Information Rights are set out in law and, subject to some exceptions, you have the:

• Right to rectification - to ask for information to be corrected
• Right to erasure - to have your personal data deleted
• Right to object - to how your data is used
• Right to restriction - to request limits on how your data is used
• Right to portability - to request that we move your data to another organisation
• Right of subject access - to request a copy of data the Council holds about you

If you have a concerns about the way we are collecting or using your personal data, you should raise your concern with us in the first instance or directly to the Information Commissioner's Office. Visit the website of the Information Commissioner's Office.

If you would like to discuss anything in this privacy notice or your information rights, please contact:

The Data Protection Officer
Middlesbrough Council
PO Box 500, Middlesbrough, TS1 9FT
Phone: 01642 245432
Email: dataprotection@middlesbrough.gov.uk