Confidentiality

Our clients work within healthcare dealing with sensitive, personal information which must be kept confidential.  When sending personal information about people on email, confidentiality is paramount.

Our therapy and case management clients are dealing with sensitive reports, documents and email correspondence all the time and expect from us, a high level of understanding around data protection and confidentiality.

It is important you clearly understand each of these parts below.

PDF documents

Why should you PDF a document:

  • To stop the receiver from making changes to the document.
  • If the document to be emailed is a large file with photos and graphics.

Password Protection – sending documents by email that hold personal information

Every time you send an attached document (which holds personal information about a person) via email to a client, you must send it password protected.

We stipulate that clients name is not typed into the subject line of an email or in the content of an email.  The use of initials of the client’s/patient’s name is to be used instead.  This is for confidentiality reasons.

Here’s how to password protect a Word or Excel document.

  1. Open the Word document
  2. Go to File
  3. Select Info
  4. Select Protect Document
  5. Select Encrypt with Password
  6. Enter a password
  7. Re-enter the password to confirm
  8. Save the document

Here’s how to password protect a PDF document

Use Adobe from this link – https://www.adobe.com/uk/acrobat/online/password-protect-pdf.html

When is it ok not to PDF a document?

If the document relates to no living person (client) and has no recognisable details of people.

As an example, your physiotherapist client has asked you to create a new form with client name and DOB details to fill in at the top, with a new physio exercise programme underneath, ready to use as a template document for their clients.

Ask for help

You will have access to the team of Virtual PAs on WhatsApp.  Should you have any problems or issues with password protecting any document, especially PDF documents, ask the team for help.

 

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