Medical Advice

If you need help when we are closed please look at section tab “Out of Hours”.

Your Rights Include:

• To be treated with dignity and respect irrespective of your colour, creed, age, medical condition (including disability) or sexual orientation.
• To be afforded the highest standard of medical care possible within the resources available.
• To be referred to a specialist or therapist if appropriate.
• To have a second opinion if that is appropriate.

Your Responsibilities include:

• To treat all members of our Staff with courtesy regardless of their colour, creed, sex, age or any disability
• To arrive in good time for your appointment
• To cancel any appointments you do not need
• To use our emergency services for medically urgent problems only
• To discuss no more than one problem per consultation
• If more than one patient needs to be seen, please book one appointment per patient

Zero Tolerance

In line with government recommendations for the NHS, this practice supports the government's NHS zero tolerance campaign. Handsworth Medical Practice has a policy that rudeness, swearing, abusive, threatening or intimidating behaviour towards any member of staff or other patients will not be tolerated. Such behaviour may result in removal from our practice list.

Freedom Of Information

We are a paper-light practice: this means that most of the information we hold about you is on our secure computer system. We take great care in safeguarding information about you. We have the highest standards of security in place and take steps to back up data regularly and have safeguards against fire and loss of data in the event of fire or other disaster.

Your data is accessed on a 'need to know' basis only. We may share your data with other agencies involved in your care such as Hospitals - we only give them the information they need to treat you. We also share data with people and organisations you ask us to, such as insurance companies and mortgage lenders.

We may submit data about you on request to the local CCG to whom we are contracted to for purposes of financial or quality audit. The information we send will usually not give your name or address and if we do include these details the people seeing this information at the CCG will be bound by the same rules of confidentiality as us.

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 obliges the practice a Publication Scheme. A Publication Scheme is a guide to the 'classes' of information the practice intends to routinely make available. This scheme is available from reception.