NHS Liverpool Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) collects and processes personal information, or personal data, relating to its employees, other workers, contractors and volunteers to manage the working relationship. This personal information may be held by the CCG on paper or in electronic format.
The CCG is committed to being transparent about how it handles your personal information, to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information and to meeting its data protection obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018. The purpose of this Privacy Notice is to make you aware of how and why we will collect and use your personal information both during and after your working relationship with the CCG ends.
This Privacy Notice applies to all current and former employees, other workers, contractors and volunteers. It is non-contractual and does not form part of any employment contract, casual worker agreement, consultancy agreement or any other contract for services.
As an employer, the CCG needs to keep and process information about you for normal employment, workforce and related purposes. The information we hold and process will be used for our management and administrative use only. We will keep and use it to enable us to run the business and manage our relationship with you effectively, lawfully and appropriately, during the recruitment process, whilst you are working for us, at the time when your employment ends and after you have left. This includes using information to enable us to comply with the employment contract, to comply with any legal requirements, and protect our legal position in the event of legal proceedings.
Under the GDPR, there are six Data Protection Principles that the CCG must comply with. These provide that the personal information we hold about you must be:
The CCG is responsible for, and must be able to demonstrate compliance with, these principles. This is called Accountability.
Personal information is any information about an individual from which that person can be directly or indirectly identified. It doesn’t include anonymised data, i.e. where all identifying particulars have been removed.
There are also special categories of personal information, which requires a higher level of data protection because it is of a more sensitive nature. The special categories of personal information comprise information about an individual’s racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, health, sex life or sexual orientation and genetic and biometric data. However, we do not collect all of these.
The CCG collects, uses and processes a range of personal information about you. This includes your:
It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and up to date. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes, e.g. if you change your home address, during your working relationship with the CCG so that our records can be updated. The CCG cannot be held responsible for any errors in your personal information in this regard unless you have notified us of the relevant change.
You will, of course, inevitably be referred to in many CCG documents and records that are produced by you and your colleagues in the course of carrying out your duties and the business of the CCG. You should refer to the CCG Information Governance Policies which are available on the intranet.
The CCG may also collect, use and process the following special categories of your personal information:
The CCG may collect personal information about employees, other workers, contractors and volunteers in a variety of ways. It is collected during the recruitment process, either directly from you or sometimes from a third party such as an employment agency. We may also collect personal information from other external third parties, such as references from former employers and criminal record checks from the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS).
We will also collect additional personal information throughout the period of your working relationship with us. This may be collected in the course of your work-related activities. Whilst some of the personal information you provide to us is mandatory and/or is a statutory or contractual requirement, some of it you may be asked to provide to us on a voluntary basis. We will inform you whether you are required to provide certain personal information to us or if you have a choice in this.
Your personal information may be stored in different places, including in your personnel file, on the CCG's HR management system and in other IT systems such as the e-mail system and Payroll Services systems.
If you do not provide certain data when requested or required, we may be unable in some circumstances to comply with our legal obligations and we will tell you about the implications of that decision. This may mean we may not be able to perform the contract we have entered into with you. You may also be unable to exercise your statutory or contractual rights.
We will only use your personal information when the law allows us to. These are known as the legal bases for processing.
Where we process your personal data, we do so under GDPR Article 6 (1) (b) which states:-
processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party or in order to take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract
Where we process ‘special categories’ of sensitive information relating to your physical and/or mental health, racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious and philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, biometric data, genetic data, or sexual orientation, we do so under GDPR Article 9 (2) (h) which states:-
processing is necessary for the purposes of preventive or occupational medicine, for the assessment of the working capacity of the employee, medical diagnosis, the provision of health or social care or treatment or the management of health or social care systems and services on the basis of Union or Member State law or pursuant to contract with a health professional and subject to the conditions and safeguards referred to in paragraph 3
Please note that we may process your information without your consent, in compliance with these Articles, where this is required or permitted by law.
We will use your personal information in one or more of the following circumstances:
We may also very occasionally use your personal information where we need to protect your vital interests (or someone else’s vital interests).
We will only disclose information about you to third parties if we are legally obliged to do so (e.g. to HMRC and DWP) or where we need to comply with our contractual duties to you, for instance we may need to pass on certain information to our external payroll provider, pension or health insurance schemes.
As an NHS Organisation, we may sometimes need to process your data to pursue our legitimate business interests, for example to:
We believe that you have a reasonable expectation, as our employee, other worker, contractor or volunteer, that we will process your personal information for these purposes.
In general terms, we will never process your data where these interests are overridden by your own interests.
The purposes for which we are processing, or will process, your personal information include to:
We do not transfer your information outside of the European Economic Area (EEA) or to an international organisation to comply with our legal or contractual requirements. We have in place safeguards including to ensure the security of your data. A copy of the safeguards can be obtained from the HR Department.
In addition, we monitor computer and telephone/mobile telephone use, as detailed in our Information Governance - Confidentiality Code of Conduct, which includes our internet and email acceptable use, available on the intranet.
Why and how do we use your sensitive personal information?
We will only collect and use your sensitive personal information, which includes special categories of personal information when the law allows us to.
Some special categories of personal information, i.e. information about your health or medical conditions and trade union membership, is processed so that we can perform or exercise our obligations or rights under employment law or social security law and in line with our Data Protection Policy. Information about health or medical conditions may also be processed for the purposes of assessing the working capacity of an employee or medical diagnosis, provided this is done under the responsibility of a medical professional subject to the obligation of professional confidentiality, e.g. a doctor, and again in line with our Data Protection Policy.
The purposes for which we are processing, or will process, these special categories of your personal information are to:
Where the CCG process other special categories of personal information, i.e. information about your racial or ethnic origin, religious or philosophical beliefs and sexual orientation, this is done only for the purpose of equal opportunities monitoring and in line with Our Data Protection Policy. Personal information that the CCG uses for these purposes is either anonymised or is collected with your explicit written consent, which can be withdrawn at any time. It is entirely your choice whether to provide such personal information.
We may also occasionally use your special categories of personal information, where it is needed for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.
We will only use your personal information for the purposes for which we collected it.
If in the future we intend to process your personal data for a purpose other than that which it was collected we will provide you with information on that purpose and any other relevant information, including the lawful basis to process your data. We may also issue a new Privacy Notice to you.
If we process your data for other purposes, we will always obtain your explicit consent to those activities, unless this is not required by law, or the information is required to protect your health in an emergency.
Where we are processing data based on your consent, you have the right (in certain circumstances) to withdraw that consent at any time. This will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before your consent was withdrawn.
Your personal information may be shared internally within the CCG, including with members of the HR department, Corporate Governance Team, payroll staff, your line manager, other managers in the department in which you work and IT staff if access to your personal information is necessary for the performance of their roles.
The CCG may also share your personal information with third-party service providers and their designated agents, such as:
Should you wish to know more about these service providers please contact Human Resources. We may also need to share your personal information with a regulator e.g. Care Quality Commission, or to otherwise comply with the law.
We may share your personal information with third parties where it is necessary to administer the contract we have entered into with you, where we need to comply with a legal obligation, or where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party).
The CCG has put in place measures to protect the security of your personal information. It has internal policies, procedures and controls in place to try and prevent your personal
information from being accidentally lost or destroyed, altered, disclosed or used or accessed in an unauthorised way. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, other workers, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know in order to perform their job duties and responsibilities.
Where your personal information is shared with third-party service providers, we require all third parties to take appropriate technical and organisational security measures to protect your personal information and to treat it subject to a duty of confidentiality and in accordance with data protection law. We only allow them to process your personal information for specified purposes and in accordance with our written instructions and we do not allow them to use your personal information for their own purposes.
The CCG also have in place procedures to deal with a suspected data security breach and we will notify the Information Commissioner’s Office (or any other applicable supervisory authority or regulator) and you of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so.
Your entire staff record will be stored for a period of 6 years following when you leave the organisation.
This includes (but is not limited to) evidence of right to work, security checks and recruitment documentation for the successful candidate including job adverts and application forms.
To reduce the burden of storage and for reasons of confidentiality, a summary will then be prepared and held until the employee’s 75th birthday or 6 years after leaving whichever is the longer and then reviewed.
The summary will contain as a minimum:
The CCG will only retain your personal information for as long as is necessary to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected and processed, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, tax, health and safety, reporting or accounting requirements.
To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we follow the Records Management Code of Practice for Health and Social Care 2016, which is a guide to use in managing records, based on current legal requirements and professional best practice.
You can see this at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/records-management-code-of-practice-for-health-and-social-care
The CCG will generally hold your personal information for the duration of your employment or engagement. The exceptions are:
Personal information which is no longer to be retained will be securely and effectively destroyed or permanently erased from our IT systems and we will also require third parties to destroy or erase such personal information where applicable.
In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal information so that it no longer permits your identification. In this case, we may retain such information for a longer period.
Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA) as a Data Subject, you have a number of statutory rights. Subject to certain conditions, and in certain circumstances, you have the right to:
This enables you to be informed how we process your data, by way of this Privacy Notice.
This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. Please note that under certain circumstances we are legal obliged to maintain a copy of your data for contractual and or statutory reasons.
This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
This enables you to transfer your electronic personal information to another party, where we can provide a copy of your data in an easily transportable format.
This enables you to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
This enables you to be told if we process your data using automated software.
Please note that the CCG do not, at present, carry out automatic processing of your data.
If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please contact the HR Department. We may need to request specific information from you in order to verify your identity and check your right to access the personal information or to exercise any of your other rights. This is a security measure to ensure that your personal information is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it.
In the limited circumstances where you have provided your consent to the processing of your personal information for a specific purpose, you have the right to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time. This will not, however, affect the lawfulness of processing based on your consent before its withdrawal. If you wish to withdraw your consent, please contact the HR Department. Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, we will no longer process your personal information for the purpose you originally agreed to, unless we have another legal basis for processing.
You have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioners’ Office if you believe that we have not complied with the requirements of the GDPR or DPA 2018 with regard to your personal data.
If you believe that the CCG has not complied with your data protection rights, you have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at any time. The ICO is the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues. You can see the ICO contact details at: https://ico.org.uk
The CCG will not transfer your personal information to countries outside the European Economic Area, except where you ask us to do so e.g. for employment purposes overseas.
Automated decision making occurs when an electronic system uses your personal information to make a decision without human intervention.
We do not carry out any automated decision making (including profiling) and as such no employment decisions will be taken about you based on automated decision making.
The CCG reserve the right to update or amend this Privacy Notice at any time, including where the CCG intend to further process your personal information for a purpose other than that for which the personal information was collected or where we intend to process new types of personal information. We will issue you with a new Privacy Notice when we make significant updates or amendments. We may also notify you about the processing of your personal information in other ways.
If you have any questions about this Privacy Notice or how we handle your personal information, please contact the Corporate Governance Team.
For the purposes of the DPA 2018 and GDPR Stephen Hendry, Head of Corporate Services and Governance has been identified as the controller and processor of staff data.
If you have any concerns as to how your data is processed you can contact: the Data Protection Officer at dpo.lccg@miaa.nhs.uk or you can write to the Data Protection Officer c/o Liverpool CCG.