Confidentiality and Information Sharing

Policies on Confidentiality

Protecting the confidentiality of client information is the DTMU’s highest priority. We work under the remit of the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse (NTA), a body with responsibility to oversee and develop treatment for substance misuse nationally.

The Department of Health has published a policy document on confidentiality:

• The NHS Confidentiality Code of Practice

The National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse (NTA) has produced documents on confidentiality and documentation:

• Confidentiality and information sharing
• Data protection and record retention
• Confidentiality Tool Kit - Updated September 2009

Update: The NTA Confidentiality Toolkit has been updated from September 2009. The revision to the consent is to help with the monitoring of TOP forms where clients are being seen across two or more agencies and where TOP compliance data may result in disclosure that the client is attending more than one agency.

A letter from the NTA is also available to download that explains this update in further detail.

To read these PDF files it is necessary to install Adobe Reader on your system. This is freely available from the Adobe web site.

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Information for Clients

There is a leaflet written for users which explains what their rights are in relation to data held about them by the NDTMS, and how it is used. This has been produced by Oxfordshire User Team (OUT), a user group, and the DTMU.

Click on cover to view.

This leaflet is a PDF file. It is necessary to install Adobe Reader on your system to read it. This is freely available from the Adobe web site.