Abortions in Great Britain must be carried out under the legal requirements set by the Abortion Act 1967. This Act requires abortion care services to send some information on the abortions they undertake to the Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).
The following information is sent:
- patient reference number
- date of birth
- postcode
- ethnicity
- marital status
- number of previous pregnancies
- treatment details
This information is also used to produce abortion care statistics with the aim of monitoring and improving services. DHSC follows extremely robust procedures to avoid the possibility of individuals being identified from the data.
The anonymised data may also be shared with the Office for National Statistics to produce conceptions data and research organisations for statistical and research purposes.
We will not disclose medical records to your GP or contact them without your permission, other than when needed for emergency medical care or safeguarding concerns. We will however inform your GP of a positive STI result in the event that we cannot reach you after several attempts. All clinical professionals are bound by the code of confidentiality and data protection laws.
Select MSI Reproductive Choices team members will have access to your information to carry out their job, to assist in the delivery of healthcare treatment, and we may need to share some of your information with other healthcare providers for your care. Also to gain NHS funding or to understand your medical history.
In some cases, we outsource certain tasks to suppliers, such as a chemist for our postal telemedicine service. We undertake checks on all suppliers that have access to client data to ensure they have appropriate security measures and data protection standards, and all suppliers sign a data processing agreement.
We may also engage with external organisations to process information on our behalf such as our professional file archiving and laboratory partners. We will always ensure that our contract with them sets out our expectations and requirements as to how they should handle your information. Where possible we will keep the sharing of your information to a minimum.
We may have to disclose your details, where required by the law, to the police, regulatory bodies or legal advisors, social care or emergency services, where it concerns your vital interests.
We will never sell your information to third parties.
The NHS national data opt-out applies to the processing of your health information for research and planning purposes and not for individual care (for example use of a MSI UK service). Opt-outs do not apply where our clients receiving treatment via NHS funding consent to the use of their data for payment and invoice validation. For further information on NHS opt out and the use of your data please visit "Your NHS data matter".