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Audio-recording your consultations with NHS doctors


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Outrageous! Stress management? What flim-flam. Encouraging other members of a medical team to touch a patient inappropriately is not gallows humour – it’s unprofessional, seedy and sinister and only exposed by a covert recording. Why should patients trust medics when there are too many examples of their untrustworthiness? And Mr Klugman is the clinical ethicist. God help us!

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I've had a look at 'The 'King's Fund' report just published and already gaining quite a lot of media coverage today. It's entitled, 'Understanding pressures in general practice' and at p. 72 declares:-

 

"…a fear of litigation came across strongly in our survey of trainees, who pointed to higher indemnity costs, increased incidence of complaints or being sued, and shifting public views about doctors:

 

Some patients are now recording consultations on their phones’

GP trainee "

 

Well, who ever would have thought it...!?

 

(ref: http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/pressures-in-general-practice)

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  • 2 weeks later...

I was interested to read one of the comments made by a doctor in nolegion’s link above, excerpt below.

“Our real results from 30 practices match the data here. There has been a massive rise in activity over the last 10 years that needs explaining. Attendance rates per person are going up. While some of this is perhaps explainable by an ageing population - I believe that health seeking behaviour has fundamentally changed - whether it’s a combination of "present early in case its cancer", a believe that "medicine can cure all ills", a workplace culture that frowns on time off for illness, or a dumping of work from secondary care to primary care, I'm not sure. But its real.”

It’s true, only when you fully understand a problem can you take steps to solve it.

You’d have thought that the pressure on GPs would have eased somewhat with the addition of people like practice nurses, physios etc and out-of-hours cover, which, in the past was handled in-house.

How many GPs are there to head of population now to, say, 30 years ago and how has the demographic really changed (not convinced by the drip-drip feed that the issue is all about the ageing population)? How many hours are they actually face to face with patients now as opposed to back in the day?

My surgery recently wrote to me suggesting I might like to find another practice, not because I’ve done anything wrong, (I’m not a regular visitor myself), but that there are just too many new people registering. (Are GPs compelled by law to take on new patients)?

Every day seems to bring new stories about poor care. Something has to change.

****

I was listening to R4’s You and Yours consumer programme. A lady contributor was calling for CCTV in care homes after she caught the cruel treatment of (I think) her mother on a hidden camera. There was the usual opposition suggesting that cameras should only be used as a last resort and how it showed lack of trust (what a worn out excuse) in the carers. Of course, the resident should be the first person to make a decision on whether they would like this option, but where they lack capacity the family should make the choice.

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  • 2 weeks later...

As the number of recordings you make increases then the need to index them properly becomes more important as I am finding out for myself.

 

I simply label the recording with the date and the main people present. I also keep the unique number my dictation machine assigns to the recording. That's it.

 

I try to remember to speak the date at the beginning of the recording but I usually forget and, anyway, it wouldn't help organise my audio files.

 

I wonder if anyone can offer any hints and tips, perhaps from indexing other types of audio recording, that I might use. Thank you in advance.

 

My Turn

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There I was, yesterday, pondering some strands of thought arising from My Turn’s, Sali’s and Ford’s recent posts, and contemplating some suggestions of my own, when a friend emails me to ask whether I has seen the NHS’s publication, this month, specifically about patients recording NHS staff, and if so what did I think of it.

 

I hadn’t, so I followed the link. Here it is, and it quite spoiled my day. It is to a pathetic, puerile, ignorant (and illegal), obstructive piece of pettifogging and deceitful bureaucracy, entitled:

 

“ Patients recording NHS staff in health and social care settings " (May 2016)

 

http://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/Documents/SecurityManagement/Patients_recording_NHS_staff_in_health_and_social_care_settings_guidance_May_2016.pdf

 

It’s not long – less than five pages – and so I won’t attempt summarise it all; you could scan the whole thing in about the same time it would take to read any commentary from me: but I’d like to make a start by pulling the plums from the duff:-

 

At last, hoo-flamin’-ray, the NHS finally openly acknowledges what the medical insurers, the ICO, eminent medics, lawyers, and many commentators on the internet have been spelling out for many years, (on page 2):-

 

“Unlike medical professionals, who are expected by the General Medical Council1 to obtain patients' consent to make visual or audio recordings, patients do not need their doctor's permission to record a medical consultation or treatment. Patient recordings which are made either covertly and overtly in order to keep a personal record of what the doctor said are deemed to constitute personal ‘note taking’ and are therefore permissible.”

 

And again (on same page & p.3):-

 

“There are no specific legal requirements that govern an individual making a personal recording of their medical consultation or treatment, either overtly or covertly, for their private use. Recordings made to keep a personal record of what the doctors said are deemed to constitute ‘note taking’ and are therefore permitted when undertaken for this purpose… a patient does not require permission to record their consultation…”

 

“The content of the recording is confidential to the patient, not the doctor or healthcare staff. The patient can waive their own confidentiality as they wish; this could include disclosing the details of their consultation with third parties or even posting and/or sharing the recording in unadulterated form on the internet through social media sites.”

 

And (p. 5):-

 

"…we cannot place restrictions on a patient wishing to record notes of a consultation or conversation with a health professional…"

 

And (same page):-

 

“…we cannot place restrictions on a patient wishing to covertly record a consultation or conversation with a health professional,”

 

Well, since that’s all exactly what I've been pitching here for over 6 years, what’s my beef?

 

Read the document through with a little care, and you will find that despite the completely unavoidable acknowledgments of the perfect legal entitlement of patients to record, if you connect the opening of the third para on p.3 with last of that para’s bullet points, it is allegedly now express NHS 'policy’ to attempt stop patients recording:

 

“…we should ensure that…patients are discouraged from taking recordings in the first place.”

 

Of all the naked, dim-witted impertinence - and what a recipe for disaster in the form of conflict and mistrust.

 

No wretched little records clerk has the slightest business trying to interfere with a patient’s perfectly legal options as to how they wish to conduct their own medical consultations.

 

This NHS guidance conflicts with statements from N.I.C.E, the GMC and with much recent opinion expressed in the BMJ and elsewhere, as regular viewers here will know. The question may now turn into, does the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt know what these jumped-up little twits have produced on his watch?

 

And, if not, why not?

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With apologies. The reference to 'discouraging' patients appears on page 5 of the document concerned - not p. 3 as I miss-typed it.

 

(Wish we had longer to edit posts here, like we did in the good ol' days.)

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Not quite sure I understand your query, Ford. Expand a bit?

 

'Processing' and 'personal data' are terms being used in the NHS ' guidance' document in a way intended to claim correspondence with the detailed and dry-as-dust 'statutory definitions' set out in the Data Protection Act 1998 . But one of the many problems with the document is that it makes airy reference to law that is often simultaneously far more complex and far more permissive than the over-simplified and sometimes very misleading half-truths the authors are choosing to express.

 

As a result - in my guess, quite intentionally - it paints a picture in which a patient's audio recording of a consultation (of say a GP's appointment a patient wants to take home to discuss with her mum) is perceived as somehow almost radio-actively dangerous - and beset by many perils and risks of statutory law: especially potentially criminal liabilities.

 

This is very largely a load of tosh, and quite irrelevant to the vast majority of patient-recorders who are law-abiding citizens taking a sensible and useful initiative in proactively engaging with their healthcare. The 'legal issues' as identified by the document will simply never concern them. The medical benefits - as identified in the work of e.g. Professor Gly Ewyn et al - and the growing body of research to this effect - certainly do concern patients, however, and this truth is totally ignored by the guidance document .

 

This will, I think inevitably, have the knock-on effect - which again I believe is fully intended - of making the worst type of officious clerk in medical Trusts (to which such clerks the guidance is effectively addressed) think they have an important 'role' to play in interfering with the way patients are perfectly entitled to consult their doctors. They don't. They are irrelevant to this aspect of a patient's preferences, and the silly little twits at 'NHS Protect' have just paved the way for repeated conflict between healthcare 'administration' and patients, as, in different ways all round the country, petty martinets try to 'implement' 'guidance' in respect of law at best tangential, and which they are woefully under-qualified to understand properly even before central NHS bureaucracy misleads them as to what the law actually is. I always advise 'Keep your cool', but the level of interference which NHS Protect is promoting will, I fear, and I would say sooner than later, provoke dangerously angry reactions from ill patients.

 

Finally, for tonight, but before I burst a blood vessel, I would like to leave with the text of a tweet a friend of mine posted earlier today:-

 

" NHS twits say it's ‘policy’ to ‘discourage’ pts from recording - thus ensuring no one declares they are. So dim."

 

So, very, very dim indeed. I have been an 'overt recorder' for most of this millennium, as I have mentioned before. But if I find the slightest whiff of 'discouragement' in my healthcare from this point forward, that status will be reversed to 'covert' forthwith. I will tell everyone here what happened, and I will alter my stance to advising others to go covert as well.

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NHS Protect is all about protecting its staff and business, not about the well-being of patients. I worry about people who do not know their rights and bow to the pressure when informed of the 'policy.' You are quite right though, once bitten, patients will not bother to ask and just go undercover.

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Thanks for that, Sali. I haven’t been quite so irritated about a piece of NHS bureaucratic behaviour for quite a long time, and there have been no shortage of opportunities to get irritated.

 

I agree that there will be unhappy patients who will get ‘cowed’ by hostility, and through that lose confidence in their care as well as the many potential benefits of having recordings. That could be seriously detrimental to their health.

 

The potential for conflict between administration\clinicians and (‘un-cowed’) patients - like yours truly - is also all too obvious.

 

And driving a perfectly legal practice completely underground will help nobody.

 

These ’NHS Protect’ gnomes really are seriously ignorant. Time to find a way or two (or more) to make absolutely sure that Mr J Hunt cannot deny responsibility for his department trying to dictate practices to doctors wholly without legal foundation, and which could be significantly harmful to patients.

 

All suggestions welcome.

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This post is about recording doctors but with a difference. It also touches on the quality of recordings.

 

A friend of mine has bulimia and some years ago she was being treated by a psychiatrist as it was interfering with her life. At the time she was a mature student studying for a law degree at a good university.

 

By co-incidence her new psychiatrist was himself taking a course in medical law in order to later undertake medico-legal work. As English wasn't his first language, he asked my friend in one consultation if she could proof read a law essay he had written. She read it and made amendments which he was very pleased about. She later told me the essay had needed considerable adjustment.

 

The psychiatrist later asked her to write one of his law essays and reluctantly she did. This didn't end there and he started to ask for more and more help with further essays but she became extremely uncomfortable about it. She found herself in a difficult situation because she needed the psychiatrist to treat her bulimia and couldn't just walk away from the planned treatment as she may not get offered an alternative psychiatrist but, at the same time, she didn't want to write his essays for him. Out of desperation she skipped several appointments.

 

The psychiatrist then started to phone her at home asking for help with his essays and he would ring 6 or 7 times a day. It got to a stage where she wouldn't answer any telephone calls at all including those from me. The psychiatrist would leave messages on her answering machine asking her to contact him to help and then he would ring again if he hadn't heard from her. She, like many bulimics, is of a very anxious disposition and, as she lived alone, she found all this extremely intimidating.

 

After weeks of this crazy situation, one day she grabbed her answering machine and took it with her to meet the medical director of the hospital. She told him what had happened and played him several messages from her machine. After hearing a few the medical director turned to her and asked, "Are you sure that's Dr ABC? I don't think it is. It doesn't sound anything like him."

 

And that is the point I'm trying to make. If you have some noisy muffled recording then it may be hard to prove who the doctor is if ever you need to at a later date. Your noisy muffled recording may be good enough to jog your memory about what happened in the consultation, which itself if very useful, but that may be all. I suppose a forensic voice analysis may help identify the speakers but that's not the sort of thing which many people, including my friend, can afford. So it could be long hard slog to get a medical director, who has just developed mysterious problems with his hearing, to accept the identity of who is on the recording.

 

This is one reason I think it can sometimes be important to have a good quality recording in case the identities of those present is questioned. The review of dictation machines I posted recently on 10th April 2016 compared an iPhone and found the iPhone to be poorer then the dictation machines. I was intrigued enough by the review to buy their recommended model which I am now testing. By contrast those very cheap audio recorders for £10 that I see on eBay and Aamzon may be a great bargain but they may be a false economy in certain circumstances.

 

Well, to come back to my friend's experience, it was by a total stroke of luck that just as the medical director asked his question about who it was, my friend and the medical director could hear the next recorded message starting up with "Hello, this is Dr ABC".

 

How sweet. I agree that may not have been 100% proof but it quickly helped the medical director to put aside his mystery deafness.

 

Unfortunately, the hospital trust went on to manipulate the complaints process shamelessly in order to bury my friend’s complaint despite such strong evidence but that's another story.

 

If anyone has any comments on this then it would be interesting to hear them.

 

 

My Turn

 

Firstly, I woukd differentiate these recordings from covert ones.

If Dr ABC left the messages on an answering machine, then they clearly intended them to be recorded.

As such, I'm not sure they are directly relevant to a thread focuisng on covert recording ....

 

However, since the Trust have failed to take action, there is no reason why:

a) Dr ABC's academic institution should not consider if an academic offence has been committed, and

b) The GMC should not consider both if

i) Dr ABC has been acting in your friend's best interest,

ii) Dr ABC has acted with academic integrity, upholding the public's trust and confidence in the profession....

 

Has she approached either / both?.

If she has the recordings (+/- copies of the essays / work that she worked on), that is physical evidence to support her claims. Proof reading work to highlight errors in grammar and syntax because someone's first language isn't English is borderline .... "considerable adjustments" and then "writing an essay for them" is well over that border.

One could ask the question "if this was just correction of the odd bit of English : why did Dr ABC need someone who was doing a law degree to do it?".

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Not quite sure I understand your query, Ford. Expand a bit?

was re my prev post #1101, and also the 'further processing' issues you allude to; on the one they seem to want to exclude it from the dpa (and its info Governance), but then include it?

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Thanks for coming back to me, Ford. The point you raise centres on one of the many (and serious) actual or apparent contradictory points in the document. In this particular instance, I think the ambiguity can be partly, but only partly, resolved and I hope the following addresses your query, at least to some extent.

 

A

 

The ‘Information Governance’ reference is not to a phrase which reflects any particular provision of law, but to a collection of ‘issues’, above all, as the document would colour it, that of ‘confidentiality’. It is middle-management prat-speak, in my view. See for instance wikiwhatsits’s screed on the terminology:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_governance

 

(What a load of verbiage.)

 

However, the document is obliged to admit that a patient taking a recording of a consultation behind closed doors is NOT a ‘confidentiality’, thus not an ‘Information Governance’, ‘issue’ in the circumstances in question. It says:

 

It is important to note that a patient’s own private recording is not an information governance issue. As the Trust is not responsible for generating or making the recording, it is not liable for safeguarding the confidentiality, integrity or security of such material.” (p.3)

 

B

 

As regards the Data Protection Act (1998) the document is also obliged to admit the Act contains a ‘let-out’ from (virtually) all of that Act’s provisions in the case of individuals behaving within the (section 36) ‘domestic purposes exemption’. The exemption is however, much wider, more open-ended, than the document wants to acknowledge.

 

The document says, for instance, that “we [i.e. NHS] should ensure that ” … "any recording is only made for personal use"

 

Which, in the opinion of yours truly, is load of deceitful poppycock , for a number, of reasons of which I will list but two at this stage:

 

1. The statutory ‘domestic purpose exemption’ is actually worded to permit ‘processing’ :

 

“for the purposes of that individual’s personal, family or household affairs (including recreational purposes)”

 

( http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/29/section/36)

 

which is a significantly wider exemption. It is, above all, abundantly clear, that merely disclosing one’s recording to a ‘third party’ would NOT breach the terms of the Data Protection Act. A patient would NOT need a clinician’s consent to make such a disclosure.

 

And thus there is NO reason to think (and this, I believe, is what truly frightens ‘officialdom’) that the posting by an individual of a complete and honest copy of a recorded consultation on the internet - - for e.g. the personal and recreational purposes of finding out what other people though about how a clinician had behaved - would in any way necessarily fall foul of the Data Protection Act at all.

 

2. It is NONSENSE to suggest ‘we must ensure’ things about the future use of any personal recording taking by a patient. A patient has no ‘obligation to ‘assure’ the NHS of anything in this respect all.

 

There are, in theory at least, fairly abstruse circumstances in which the law could step to prohibit subsequent ‘misuse’ of a recording taken, some of which are very sketchily (i.e. inadequately) referred to in the document. But such considerations CANNOT be taken to justify any attempt to interfere with a patient’s perfectly legal entitlement to take a recording ‘in the first place’ (as the document puts it).

 

I have a second-hand car which, I believe, is capable of travelling at more than 90 mph. Anyone who tries to tell me that, because of that potential for illegality,’ I shouldn’t take to the road, can go do something to themselves so dire that our host site would probably prefer I didn’t even hint at it.

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Firstly, I woukd differentiate these recordings from covert ones.

If Dr ABC left the messages on an answering machine, then they clearly intended them to be recorded.

As such, I'm not sure they are directly relevant to a thread focuisng on covert recording ....

 

However, since the Trust have failed to take action, there is no reason why:

a) Dr ABC's academic institution should not consider if an academic offence has been committed, and

b) The GMC should not consider both if

i) Dr ABC has been acting in your friend's best interest,

ii) Dr ABC has acted with academic integrity, upholding the public's trust and confidence in the profession....

 

Has she approached either / both?.

 

If she has the recordings (+/- copies of the essays / work that she worked on), that is physical evidence to support her claims. Proof reading work to highlight errors in grammar and syntax because someone's first language isn't English is borderline .... "considerable adjustments" and then "writing an essay for them" is well over that border.

 

One could ask the question "if this was just correction of the odd bit of English : why did Dr ABC need someone who was doing a law degree to do it?".

 

Hello BazzaS. I agree that there is a difference between my friend's case and recording doctor's consultations. However my friend's case illustrates some of the pitfalls if a recording of a consultation later gets used to proved to a medical institution what a doctor said. In this instance the medical director tried to disregard the recording by saying it wasn't the voice of the doctor.

 

As the toxic relationship progressed, my friend was almost completely writing the doctor’s law essays. I think his English was so poor that he was lucky that any language test for foreign doctor’s was, in those days, too easy but this has been changed now.

 

You outline some useful courses of action. Unfortunately this is now all in the past. My friend went down the complaints procedure route. Predictably enough, the hospital trust tried hard to derail her case and in the end succeeded by appointing an investigator who was a close colleague of the doctor involved. Subsequently, she found it hard to get treatment for her bulimia and other anxiety problems. This all became so unsettling that she had to leave her university where she was studying her law degree and never went back.

 

As it turned out, as I imagine is often the case, my friend's need for medical help was too great for her to successfully challenge the system.

 

My Turn

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Hello Legion. Thank you for drawing our attention to the document:

"Patients recording NHS staff in health and social care settings" (May 2016).

 

I chased it up and found it listed along with other guidance publications on this web page belonging to NHS Protect: http://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/3641.aspx.

 

Amongst the publications listed there I noticed one called:

"Unacceptable behaviour – Guidance on warning letters and other written communications". This is a direct link: http://bit.ly/22CkNsv

 

In the text of that document, it gives as an example of anti-social behaviour

 

"Taking photos/videos or making sound recordings without permission"

 

They should really have explicitly excluded doctor consultations in case a reader misunderstands what rights a patient actually has.

 

 

 

.

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These ’NHS Protect’ gnomes really are seriously ignorant. Time to find a way or two (or more) to make absolutely sure that Mr J Hunt cannot deny responsibility for his department trying to dictate practices to doctors wholly without legal foundation, and which could be significantly harmful to patients.

 

All suggestions welcome.

 

 

I'm all for starting a campaign which forces the NHS to actively encourage patients recording their consultations. Not everyone will take it up and some may still choose to record covertly.

 

 

Where to start though? Probably with Jeremy Hunt, perhaps NHS England and the CQC. I want it to be normal practice in the future to be asked whether I wish to making a recording.

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Many thanks again, Sali.

 

I lifted the contact details for Jeremy Hunt from the DoH website earlier today. See below:-

....................................................................................

 

The Rt. Honourable Jeremy Hunt

Secretary of State for Health

Ministerial Correspondence and Public Enquiries Unit

Department of Health

Richmond House

79 Whitehall

London

SW1A 2NS

 

Contact form:-

 

https://contactus.dh.gov.uk/?openform

 

Telephone0207 210 4850

Fax0115 902 3202

Textphone0207 451 7965

 

Open Monday to Friday, 8.30am to 5.30pm

 

.........................................................................

 

Suggestion: in whatever form one contacts these people, if it the complaint is about (or includes issues concerning) the 'NHS Protect' (May 2016) ‘anti-recording’ document as discussed over the past week or so, include at least the exact wording of the beginning of the document’s title in one's communication i.e :-

 

Patients Recording NHS Staff

 

- but don’t hand them the URL.

 

I suggest this because, at the moment at least, if you put that partial title (as a ‘string’) into a certain search engine beginning with ‘G’, it will return just 3 results: 2 are to the DoH source of the online document - and the 3rd is to this thread. I would soooo like some wretched little DoH bureaucrats to encounter that situation and then come to see what we think of recent developments here.

 

In parallel with that, it’s contact your MP time, in my view. Unfortunately, mine’s a former Tory cabinet minister who also used to practise as a doctor…

 

But then there's always the Daily Mail...

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nolegion

re the dpa q.

if patient x (or the gp) wants the audio recording on the record, is that possible. then, it wld be subject to the dpa and governance. what then re the recording held by x. if x discloses it etc, then it is no longer subject to the dpa?

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Ford.

 

1. A recording of a consultation taken by a patient belongs to the patient and the doctor has no right to a copy.

 

If a doctor requests a copy for the patient’s medical purposes and is given it by the patient (which s/he elects to keep), then it should form part of the patient’s medical record & accordingly would be subject to DPA subject access requests and the like.

A patient, however, cannot oblige a doctor to put an ‘unsolicited’ copy of the recording with the patient’s medical records.

 

(N.B. Nevertheless, it can still be used as vital evidence to force written entries\corrections into inaccurate or misleading records)

 

2. Disclosure. This gets a bit more tricky.

 

(i) Even if the recording does not ’identify’ the doctor concerned e.g. because his or her name is never announced during the consultation, it’s still going to constitute ‘personal data’ within the terms of the DPA, because it is to be presumed that the patient knows, or could easily find out, the name of the person who has just been consulted (and that is made relevant by the technical details of the DPA.)

 

When a patient ‘processes’ that data (which again is technically defined - but could easily come to pass when the patient discloses it to a third party), the patient is, however, protected from contravention of the DPA by the ‘section 36 exemption’ recently discussed. Thus the patient is OK provided the disclosure concerned is made for the patient’s personal, family, household or recreational purposes.

 

(ii) If the recipient of the disclosure is an individual who doesn’t know the identity of the doctor (and it’s not revealed by the recording) then any further disclosure (of the recording itself, say) by that recipient won’t contravene the Act either because, in the recipient’s hands, the ‘data’ is not ‘personal’ data, and is therefore not within the terms of the Act.

 

(iii) If people are following this, there remain some questions.

 

Let us say the patient puts a recording of the consultation, in full, and with fair context, onto the net for the purposes of finding out what other net users think of the way the doctor behaved, and either the recording itself identifies the doctor or the patient declares who it was, along with the original posting. Now, is a genuine private individual re-posting a copy of that recording, knowing and /or identifying the name of the doctor, on their own website which they maintain as a hobby, able to claim that they are processing personal data for the purposes of their personal family, household or recreational affairs?

 

Well, I would argue that the section 36 exemption is wide enough to cover this too - in fact even just by the ‘recreational’ reference alone. But there may be room to argue about this question, depending on the precise nature and circumstances of the 'further disclosure', so I wouldn’t bet the ranch on this opinion.

 

The moral of this, in practical terms for those keen to ‘publish’, is don’t let your posting identify the doctor in the first place.

 

Excise any identifying references in it or accompanying it, and then it can travel like wildfire.

 

(NB Looking at it from a doctor’s point of view, if in quest of suppressing further electronic dissemination of an 'identifying' posting, it would probably be a better bet to go after the ‘hosts’ of the recordings on the net e.g. forums or websites run by businesses or organisations. They cannot claim the s36 exemption because they are not ‘individuals’ and would have to look for various other legal arguments such as the ‘journalism’ exemption in the Act; they should be fine if the recording is accurate, but in practice most legitimate hosts will remove something identifying an individual if the individual complains, simply because they don’t want the hassle - and, on account of this, may well have rules against such 'identification' of individuals in the first place)

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  • 1 month later...

Did anyone hear the R4 You and Yours broadcast? The subject of audio recording PIP assessment interviews came up. These are the DWP's rules:

 

 

You can request to audio record your consultation by calling our Customer Service Centre, but you will need to provide your own equipment.

 

  • Inform us beforehand that you wish to record your consultation, which can be done by calling our Customer Service Centre. Please let us know as soon as possible, as we may not be able to accept requests made on the day of your consultation.

 

  • Your recording equipment must be able to produce two identical copies of the recording at the end of the consultation, either in audio cassette or CD format. You will need to give one copy of the recording to the Health Professional undertaking your consultation, at the end of the consultation. Devices like PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones or MP3 players are not acceptable recording devices.

 

  • You will need to sign an agreement that sets out what you are and are not allowed to do with the recording.

Now, I don't know anyone who requires this service, (or who on earth has a tape machine), but nobody asked the question whether the DWP's stance is legal. How is it legal to record a consultation with your medic, covertly or otherwise, but not with the DWP? What happens if the assessed records covertly and then needs that evidence (maybe the assessor was rude or gave incorrect advice) at some later stage?

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