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Adult Social Care privacy notice

About this notice

Our core data protection obligations and commitments are set out in the council's main privacy notice.

This notice provides additional privacy information for adult social care.

It describes how we collect, use and share personal information about you:

  • In relation to Adult Social Care
  • The types of personal information we need to process, including information the law describes as 'special' because of its sensitivity

It is important that you read this notice, together with any other privacy information we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal information about you, so that you are aware of how and why we are using such information.

The information collected and held may be done so in a variety of ways.

Purpose(s)

We collect your personal information for the following purpose(s):

  • Provide you with the information and advice
  • Assess your current needs and how best to meet them
  • Understand your previous health care and support
  • Make sure your support is safe and effective and ensure the care you are receiving is meeting your needs
  • To work with partners to ensure you get the best possible service and commission other services where appropriate. Sharing your information means you won't have to repeat questions to other health and care services.
  • Calculate financial assessments for care services received
  • Calculate finances and keep track of spend towards your care service
  • Apply for Appointeeship or Court of Protection
  • Help investigate any worries or complaints you have about your care
  • Review the quality of care you are receiving
  • Research and analysis which is then used to plan new services, assess our performance and commission new services
  • Ensure compliance with safeguarding adults policies and procedures
  • Completion of statutory government returns around health and social care

Categories of personal data

In order to carry out these purposes we collect and obtain:

  • Basic details about you such as name, address, telephone number, email address and date of birth
  • Details surrounding your family
  • Housing circumstances
  • Housing needs
  • Lifestyle and social circumstances
  • Financial details
  • Employment and education details
  • Business information and activities
  • Physical or mental health
  • Religious beliefs
  • Sexual life or sexual orientation
  • Crime / Offending data
  • Race or ethnic origin
  • Nationality

Legal basis for processing

The legal basis for processing your personal information is:

  • Performing or exercising obligations as part of a legal requirement (The Care Act, 2014 and Health and Social Care Act, 2012)
  • In the public interest or in the exercise of official authority
  • In order to process special category data for the provision of health and social care

Consequences if information is not provided

If you fail to provide certain information when requested, we may be unable to provide the service to you, or it may limit the effectiveness of delivery. It may also prevent is from complying with our legal obligations. In addition we may be unable to address any query, issue or complaint or further issues which may result.

Information sharing and recipients

We may collect and share personal information about you with the following types of organisations:

  • Teams within Bury Council in order to provide our services to you
  • Health services (for example GPs, Pennine Acute Hospitals Trust; Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust and Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust)
  • Care providers commissioned to provide care
  • Some voluntary sector organisations where they are commissioned to provide direct health and care services
  • Other Local Authorities
  • Government agencies
  • Officer of the Public Guardian and Court or Protection
  • Department for Work and Pensions
  • Emergency services
  • Third parties who help us with research and analysis of local care services. Although this shared information is about the care received by our service users, it does not identify anyone directly by name or address. Instead we use a numerical identifier so that the information we share does not contain anything that could identify service users directly.

We may share information with the organisations listed above in order to provide a service to you or where we are required to do so by law, to safeguard public safety, and in risk of harm or emergency situations. We may also share information to safeguard public funds administered by the Authority.

Additional sharing

We also share some data about you for two important projects. The first of these, the Adult Social Care Minimum data set, involves sharing with other local authorities in Greater Manchester and with NHS England in line with section 6 of the Care Act 2014 so we can assess our performance and improve how we deliver our local care services. Although this shared information is about the care received by our service users, it does not identify anyone directly by name or address. Instead we use a numerical identifier so that the information we share does not contain anything that could identify service users directly. The shared information is used solely to produce aggregated reports at a statistical level to compare and assess our performance across Greater Manchester. This helps us to continuously and collectively improve our local services.

Second, the council is taking part in a new Markets and Modelling Project. This will involve sharing of data with the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) (owned by the Local Government Association). Again, a numerical identifier will be used so that the information we share does not contain anything that could identify service users directly. Shared information will include data about the types of settings individuals reside in/services individuals use, their age group, their sex and information about their care needs. The primary aim of this project is to help councils, sub-regions and regions understand and shape their adult social care markets by collecting data and building online tools which enable analysis and modelling of markets. It is also hoped that this will help us with future planning and predicting demand enabling us to better coordinate social care provision that provides the outcomes we desire for our residents. The legal justification for this sharing is that it is necessary for the performance of a task in the public interest - it is in the in line with Section 5 of the Care Act 2014 which requires local authorities to promote the efficient and effective operation of the market in care services.

Your NHS Number

Local health and social care services are working together to improve how your information is shared to support the decisions they make about your care. We ask for your NHS Number as it helps to uniquely identify you when sharing information between health and social care.

Automated decisions

For this service all the decisions we make about you involve human intervention.

Data retention and criteria

We will only keep your personal information for as long as the law specifies or where the law does not specify this, for the length of time determined by our business requirements.

Rights of individuals

Information about the following is accessible in our guide to exercising your rights:

  • exercising your rights
  • contacting our Data Protection Officer
  • raising a concern with us, or
  • making a complaint to the Information Commissioner