Hi Sheila, how does GDPR impact on individuals who receive support from domiciliary care agencies and what are the key areas of note?

Answered by Sheila Scott

Dear P,

Thank you for your question. I have already answered a question about GDPR today but I wanted to reinforce what I have said because you particularly refer to care provided by domiciliary care services.

The first point I want to stress again is that the GDPR are regulations that relate to how organisations protect personal data .Care providers hold a huge amount of information about service users and their staff and the security and confidentiality of that information is the prime consideration of GDPR.

You must have policies and procedures and systems in place to demonstrate that you comply with GDPR. If you have a Quality Management System in place such as Quality Compliance Systems(QCS) then you will already have all the relevant paperwork to demonstrate your policy and procedure. If you aren’t registered with QCS you can still access our free resources which include blogs written by our GDPR legal experts and our Q Talks on GDPR via our website. I would also suggest you visit the Information Commissioner’s Office website and make sure you register your business with the ICO if you haven’t already.

Service Users and Staff need to know what information you have about them and how you will use it , store it, how long you keep it and how you will destroy it. You should make sure that information you provide to service users is shared in a way that they can understand and is accessible.

When you carry out an assessment in a service user’s home, you should discuss with them , or if they lack capacity someone who can legally act on their behalf, where they want the records to be kept in their home so that your staff can access them when they visit but they aren’t left where people who shouldn’t have access to them can see them. This is tricky as it is someone’s home and it is a good idea to document where you have agreed to store records in the home so you can inform your staff.

I hope this is helpful.

Best wishes.

Sheila