Looked after children health checks

In order to comply with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), where personal data relating to a data subject is collected, Lancashire County Council would like to provide you with the following details.

Identity and contact details of the data controller

Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ

Contact details of the data protection officer

Our Data Protection Officer is Paul Bond. You can contact him at dpo@lancashire.gov.uk or Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ

Purposes for processing

Lancashire County Council has a responsibility to secure the health and wellbeing of children who become looked after, as set out in statutory guidance concerning the delivery of health assessments. Initial and review health assessments take place as part of Lancashire County Council's corporate parenting responsibilities. Lancashire County Council work with appropriately skilled medical professionals to secure these assessments, which then form part of the care planning process. Usually doctors, paediatric specialists, health visitors and school nurses are involved in this process.

Consent of parents and those with parental responsibility is always sought prior to the health assessment process.

All looked after children require timely health assessments to be carried out by our health partners and the secure exchange of relevant information is an essential part of this work to keep children looked after healthy and safe.

Your information will only be used to ensure:

The right placement is found with services in place to meet any identified health needs
A health assessment is completed to allow for arrangements to be put in place to ensure this is done on time and any follow-on health care is provided and planned for including dental checks
The care plan requires adjustment to fully reflect any aspects of health related or educational needs

Category of personal data being processed

Personal data (information relating to a living, identifiable individual)
Special category personal data (racial, ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person's sex life or sexual orientation)

Legal basis for processing personal data

The legal basis for processing your personal data, in accordance with the UK GDPR is:

(c) Legal Obligation: the processing is necessary for you to comply with the law. You must reference the applicable legislation if you wish to rely on this basis for processing.

Legal basis for processing special categories of personal data

The legal basis for processing your special categories of personal data, in accordance with the UK GDPR is:

(h) 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.

The relevant legal obligations that inform the data processing in this instance are as follows:

Children Act 2004 - Sections 10 and 11 of the Children Act 2004 place obligations upon agencies including local authorities, police, clinical commissioning groups and NHS England to co-operate with other partners in promoting the welfare of children and ensuring that they act safeguard and promote the welfare of children in their area.

Children Act 1989 - For children and young people, the nature of the information that will be shared by Lancashire County Council may fall below a statutory threshold of Section 47 (children in need of protection) or even Section 17 (children in need of services).

Working Together to Safeguard Children (2018) requires practitioners "to share information for safeguarding purposes, including information which is sensitive and personal (special category personal data)"……."where practitioners need to share special category personal data, they should be aware that the Data Protection Act 2018 contains ‘safeguarding of children and individuals at risk’ as a processing condition that allows practitioners to share information. This includes allowing practitioners to share information without consent, if it is not possible to gain consent, it cannot be reasonably expected that a practitioner gains consent, or if to gain consent would place a child at risk".

Recipients of the data

Our principle health partners locally are:

Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group
NHS Chorley and South Ribble Clinical Commissioning Group
NHS East Lancashire Clinical Commissioning Group
NHS Fylde and Wyre Clinical Commissioning Group
Greater Preston Clinical Commissioning Group
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
NHS Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit
Lancashire Care Foundation Trust
University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust
East Lancashire Teaching Hospitals Trust
Virgin Care Services Ltd

Where children are placed outside of the Lancashire area, other local authorities will be involved in securing assessments with the locally commissioned organisations.

These local and out of area organisations will be operating to the same legal standards and be processing information securely and will have their own privacy notices.

Information we share

In order to facilitate these health assessments and reviews, which include dental checks, Lancashire County Council will share the following categories of information with our healthcare partners.

Report detail
Service user number
NHS number
Name
Date of birth
Age
Gender
Ethnicity
Disability
Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP)
Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ)
Case worker name/team/district
Period of care dates
Legal status, including dates
Placement address (including marked as confidential to be maintained as confidential by health services)
Placement details
Provider code
Event type: Health assessment/Dental check
Examination date
Health assessment status
Initial Health assessment / review health assessment summaries
IN Time (examination date on or before required date and after period of care date)
Up to Date (as is currently)
Due in next 3 Months Yes/No (Status completed, examination date is 6/12 months depending on age, and if this date is within the next 3 months or less)
District
Case worker name
Case worker manager name
Independent Reviewing Officer name
Information relevant to safeguarding the child or young person being looked after

Additional information is shared to evaluate the quality and efficiency of the process and avoid any drift or delay for children receiving their assessment or ongoing support in a timely manner.

To meet its obligations as a corporate parent, Lancashire County Council will share information about the children in our care with the relevant CCGs and partners providing the support service. This list is provided to ensure that our health partners have the correct information to enable them to carry out the appropriate health assessment and arrange any additional healthcare in an efficient and timely manner. A summary only of the assessment in then shared back to Lancashire County Council to enable care plans to reflect and support the meeting of any needs identified.

The forms used to collect information and share with partners during the process are based on national good practice established through the organisation CoramBAARF.

Any transfers to another country

Retention periods

Lancashire County Council will only store your information for as long as is legally required or in situations where there is no legal retention period they will follow established best practice.

File type	Description	Retention period
Email	Emails held in Outlook that haven't been exported or moved elsewhere.	Retained in accordance with appropriate internal retention guidelines
Children looked after	The arrangements for Placement of Children (General) Regulations 1991 and the Children’s Homes (Amendment) Regulations 2011	Files of children who are looked after, or who cease to be looked after, before the age of 18 years, should be retained completely intact until the 18 birthday is reached. 75 years from date of birth or if the child has died before reaching 18 years, for the period of 15 years from the date of death or when the age of 18 would have been achieved, whichever is the later.

Your rights

You have certain rights under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), these are the right:

to be informed via Privacy Notices such as this.
to withdraw your consent. If we are relying on your consent to process your data then you can remove this at any point.
of access to any personal information the council holds about yourself. To request a copy of this information you must make a subject access request in writing. You are entitled to receive a copy of your personal data within 1 calendar month of our receipt of your subject access request. If your request is complex then we can extend this period by a further two months, if we need to do this we will contact you. You can request a subject access request, either via a letter or via an email to Information Governance Team, address below.
of rectification, we must correct inaccurate or incomplete data within one month.
to erasure. You have the right to have your personal data erased and to prevent processing unless we have a legal obligation to process your personal information.
to restrict processing. You have the right to suppress processing. We can retain just enough information about you to ensure that the restriction is respected in future.
to data portability. We can provide you with your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine readable form when asked.
to object. You can object to your personal data being used for profiling, direct marketing or research purposes.
in relation to automated decision making and profiling, to reduce the risk that a potentially damaging decision is taken without human intervention.

If you want to exercise any of these rights then you can do so by contacting:

Information Governance Team
Lancashire County Council
PO Box 78
County Hall
Preston
PR1 8XJ

Email: dpo@lancashire.gov.uk

To ensure that we can deal with your request as efficiently as possible you will need to include your current name and address, proof of identity (a copy of your driving licence, passport or two different utility bills that display your name and address), as much detail as possible regarding your request so that we can identify any information we may hold about you, this may include your previous name and address, date of birth and what council service you were involved with.

Further information

If you would like more information about this specific service then please contact Andy.Smith@lancashire.gov.uk

For more information about how we use personal information see Lancashire County Council's full privacy notice.

If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact the Information Governance team who will investigate the matter.

Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ or email: dataprotection@lancashire.gov.uk

If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data not in accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).