What this notice covers, and what it does not
This notice is about this website only. It covers what happens when you visit clinicalcontact.co.uk.
It does not cover the telephone call itself, or your medical records. Those are covered by our main privacy notice and by your GP practice's own, and your practice holds your record. See the call itself below.
The short version
- This website sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device.
- There is no analytics, no tracking, and no advertising.
- There are no third-party services on the page at all. No fonts, no maps, no embedded video, nothing loaded from another company.
- We do not ask you for your name, your date of birth, your NHS number, or any other detail about you. There is no form to fill in.
Who is responsible
For your medical records and the call itself, your GP practice and the clinical pharmacy service are each independent data controllers, working under a data sharing agreement between them. Your practice holds your record and stays responsible for your care.
For this website, the controller is the company that operates the Clinical Contact service. UK data protection law requires us to name it, so here it is in full.
Virtual Pharmacist Ltd
Registered in England and Wales, company number 13258094
Registered office Queen Street Chambers, 68 Queen Street, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, S1 1WR
ICO data protection registration ZB127110
NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit, ODS code S6I6X
Data protection enquiries and our data protection officer:
legal@virtualpharmacist.co.uk
What happens when you open the page
Like every website, this one has to know where to send the page, so your device's internet address (IP address) reaches our hosting provider. An IP address counts as personal data under UK data protection law, so it is worth being precise about what happens to it.
- Our hosting provider uses it to deliver the page and to block attacks on the site.
- It is held in the provider's own short-term security logs.
- We do not store it, log it, or use it to identify you, and we never connect it to your medical record or to any call you have had.
Our lawful basis is legitimate interests, meaning running a website securely. Hosting provider: Cloudflare, Inc., whose UK and EU traffic is served from its own network.
The “your area” panel
The page shows the NHS organisation that commissions GP services in your part of the country. It is there so the page feels relevant to you, and so you can see we know which part of the UK we are talking about.
Here is exactly how it works.
- Our hosting provider already has a rough idea of where your request came from, worked out at its own network edge. Your IP address is never sent to a separate location-lookup company.
- Our own code asks that edge one question and receives back only the first one or two letters of the postcode, such as “BN”, “M” or “SW”, and which UK nation you are in. It never receives your full postcode, your town, or your IP address.
- That answer is used to pick a name, shown on screen, and then discarded.
- Nothing is written to your device and nothing is recorded at our end. If you close the page, no trace of it remains anywhere.
Our lawful basis is legitimate interests, meaning helping you judge whether a call about your health was genuine. If you would rather it did not run, turn JavaScript off in your browser: the page works perfectly well without it, and simply does not show the panel.
This is a coarse and sometimes inaccurate guess, particularly on a mobile network. It is not a record of where you live, and we do not treat it as one.
Cookies
This website sets no cookies whatsoever. It also uses no local storage, no session storage and no similar technology.
That is why you have not been shown a cookie banner. There is nothing to consent to, and we did not want anything standing between you and the answer you came for.
The telephone call itself
When a pharmacist or clinician contacts you about your care, that is separate from this website and is governed by different arrangements.
- Your GP practice and the clinical pharmacy service are each independent data controllers for your information, working under a controller-to-controller data sharing agreement. That means both are answerable for their own handling of it, and you can raise a question with either.
- We see the records of patients at practices we are working with, and only what is needed for the work that practice has asked for.
- Notes from the call go into your practice's own clinical system, such as SystmOne, EMIS, Vision or Medicus. They are not kept separately by us beyond the period set by that agreement and by the NHS Records Management Code of Practice 2023.
- Your information is never used for marketing and is never sold.
- Calls are recorded. See below.
Our full privacy notice, covering the clinical service rather than this website, is at virtualpharmacist.co.uk/privacy-policy.
Calls are recorded
Telephone calls between you and a clinician are recorded. We are telling you here because you are entitled to know, and because you may not be told during the call itself.
Recordings are used to:
- check the safety and quality of the advice given to you
- settle any question about what was said or agreed
- support training and clinical supervision
They are kept for one year from the date of the call and are then deleted. They are not used for marketing, and they are not sold or shared outside your care.
You can ask for a copy of a recording of your own call. Write to legal@virtualpharmacist.co.uk and say roughly when the call took place. You can also ask us to delete it, and we will unless we are required to keep it.
If you are unhappy about a call being recorded, tell the clinician at the time, or contact us using the details above.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you can ask us to:
- tell you what information we hold about you, and give you a copy
- correct anything that is wrong
- delete information, or limit what we do with it
- stop processing that relies on legitimate interests
For anything about your medical record, your GP practice is usually the right place to ask, because it holds the record. For anything about this website, contact us at legal@virtualpharmacist.co.uk.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. You can complain to the ICO without contacting us first, although we would rather have the chance to put things right.
Changes to this notice
If we change how this website handles information, we will update this page and change the review date at the top. There is no mailing list to notify, because we do not hold one.
On this page
Checking a call
If you came here because of a missed call, the main page explains who we are and how to check the call was genuine.