Freedom of Information Publication Scheme 2009

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The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gives you the right to obtain information held by public authorities, of which this Trust is one, unless there are good reasons to keep it confidential.

The Trust is obliged to provide information either:

• Through a publications scheme, or
• In response to requests made under the general right of access.

The Information Commissioner's Office provides further information about accessing information from a public authority on their website - http://www.ico.gov.uk.

• Quick Summary of Information Available
• Publication scheme
• How to request information that is not included in the publication scheme
• Requests for access to environmental information
• Access to personal information
• Confidentiality
• Requests for access to personal information under the Data Protection Act 1998
• Fees and charges
• Assessing the appropriate limit
• Calculation of fees
• Requests costing more than the appropriate limit
• Aggregating requests
• When can you aggregate requests?
• Data Protection Act 1998 requests for personal information
• Environmental information regulations 2005
• Mixed requests
• Re-use of public sector information regulations
• Directors Register of Interests

 

Publication scheme

In order to comply with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 public sector organisations such as ours have to routinely publish information whenever possible.

The Information Commissioner, who is responsible for monitoring and enforcing compliance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, has drawn up what is called a Model Publication Scheme for all public sector organisations.

The Commissioner has also published a 'Definition Document for NHS Organisations'

This sets out in some detail what his minimum expectations are as far as we are concerned and the Trust has decided to adopt and formally commit to the new model scheme.

We have reviewed the information we routinely put into the public domain to ensure we are compliant with the definition document. You will be able to see where we don't hold relevant information or where, for some reason, we have decided not to routinely disclose information identified in the definition document by referring to our Publication Scheme Guidance to Information.

Most of the information we make routinely available can be accessed through our website by using the search facility. Such information is continually updated. If you cannot find information through the search engine and we have indicated in the definition document that the information is routinely available this may be because the information cannot be loaded onto our website. In such circumstances please contact Deborah Coombs, Head of Information Governance - katie.thomas@nuh.nhs.uk - 0115 969 1169, Ext. 57169 - and ask for the information to be provided to you.

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How to request information that is not included in the publication scheme
As an open and transparent organisation we are committed to routinely publishing as much information as possible; however if you want information which is not available on our website or through our guide to information you may ask us for it in accordance with further provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Requests for such information should be made in writing and sent to:

FOI Office
Patient Records Department
B Floor
Nottingham University Hospital NHS Trust
QMC Campus
Nottingham
NG7 2UH

Telephone: 0115 9249924 ext  

Email: foi@nuh.nhs.uk 

By law we have to deal with such requests within 20 working days unless an exemption applies. If you make a request and are not satisfied with the way in which we deal with it you may ask us to review any decision we make. If you wish us to undertake such a review you should write to:

Lynne Birchall
Complaints Lead
Trust HQ
North Road
City Hospital campus
Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust
Hucknall Road
Nottingham NG5 1PB
0115 969 1169 ext 76023

Email - lynne.birchall@nuh.nhs.uk

Any review will normally be under the control and direction of a senior member of staff who had no involvement in the original decision or process.

If you remain dissatisfied at the conclusion of any review you may complain to the Information Commissioner whose address is:

Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

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Requests for access to environmental information

Requests for information which falls into the following six main areas is environmental information, which is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act provisions under section 35 and instead will be dealt with under the Environmental Regulations 2005:

• The state of the elements of the environment, such as air, water, soil, land, fauna (including human beings)
• Emissions and discharges, noise, energy, radiation, waste and other such substances
• Measures and activities such as policies, plans, and agreements affecting or likely to affect the state of the elements of the environment
• Reports, cost-benefit and economic analyses
• The state of human health and safety, contamination of the food chain
• Cultural sites and built structures (to the extent they may be affected by the state of the elements of the environment)

The main features of the Environmental Information Regulations are

• requests may be made orally or in writing
• the public authority must reply within 20 working days, but can extend that to 40 days in certain circumstances
• there is a limited range of exceptions, all of which are subject to a public interest test
• there is no "appropriate limit" and fees and charges can be applied

If you want environmental information which is not available on our website or through our guide to information you may ask us for it in accordance with further provisions of the Regulations either by writing to the Freedom of Information office (as above), or by telephone to:

John Korna
Regulatory and Performance Manager
Estates and Facilities Directorate
City Hospital campus
Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust
Hucknall Road
Nottingham
NG5  1PB
Telephone - 0115 9691169, Ext. 55966
Email - john.korna@nuh.nhs.uk

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Access to personal information

Information about your personal treatment and care is confidential and will normally be something you will discuss with the healthcare professionals with whom you come into contact. However there may be other issues about which you would like further information or you may just want to have a copy of the information we hold and in this part of our website we explain how you can obtain such information.

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Confidentiality

We aim to provide you with the highest quality of healthcare. To do this, we must keep records about you, your health and the care we have provided to you or plan to provide to you. NUH is committed to ensuring patient health records and other personal information is kept securely and confidential. All NUH staff are under a legal and contracted obligation to maintain confidentiality and any breach of that duty is a serious disciplinary offence.

You have the right to confidentiality under the Data Protection Act 1998, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the common law duty of confidence. You also have the right to ask for a copy of your health records and any other personal information that we may hold about you. Further information about access to your personal information under the Data Protection Act is available in this section of our Publication Scheme. The Trust has produced a leaflet entitled "Your Information" which gives further details about how we use your information, which is available to download here. Alternatively, please contact our PALS department if you would like a copy sent to you. www.nuh.nhs.uk/pals.

The NHS Care Record Guarantee sets out the rules that will govern information held in the NHS Care Records Service. This will form an important part of the public information campaign about NHS Care Records.

The NHS Care Record Guarantee is regularly reviewed by the National Information Governance Board. It was developed by the Care Record Development Board (CRDB).

A copy of the NHS Care Record Guarantee is available to download or order from the National Information Governance Board website: http://www.nigb.nhs.uk/guarantee

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Requests for access to personal information under the Data Protection Act 1998

If you want to ask us for information that we may hold about you personally, then this will be dealt with as a subject access request under section 7 of the Data Protection Act 1998. This would include, for example, information relating to your health records, employment and training records or other information about you as an individual held as a computerised or paper record, which we are obliged to provide within a 40 day period unless an exemption applies.

Limited rights of access to medical records of a deceased person are provided under the Access to Health Records Act 1990.

There will usually be a charge for this service, ranging from a minimum fee of £10 to a maximum £50.

Further information about rights of access to personal data, how to make a request, who to contact and the charging regime can be found here.

Access to personal information of a third party will be considered under the Freedom of Information Act, however it may fall into an exemption if disclosure would breach the Data Protection principles or duty of confidence.

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Fees and charges

The Freedom of Information Act and the associated Fees Regulations stipulate that we cannot levy a fee for information unless there is a statutory basis for doing so or the amount of time taken to locate the information exceeds 18 hours. However, we are allowed to charge for disbursements related to the provision of information and any reformatting requested by the applicant provided we ensure that applicants are aware of any charges that may be made.

Our fees are based on The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, Statutory Instrument 2004 No. 3244, a copy of which can be found at: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/em2004/uksiem_20043244_en.pdf

No charges will be made for information accessed via our website. For any information that is provided in hard copy and where there are no statutory provisions our rates for photocopying, postage and reformatting will be as follows:

Photocopying and printing	20p per copy
Postage	2nd class postage
Reformatting	Calculated at £25 per hour plus the additional cost of reproduction in anything other than paper format.

Further information about the Fees regulations can be found in the Ministry of Justice step-by-step guide to fees:

http://www.justice.gov.uk/guidance/foi-step-by-step-fees.aspx

Assessing the appropriate limit

The Act provides for public authorities to either charge for or decline requests for information that would cost over what is referred to as the appropriate limit. With regards to NUH (and other public authorities) the appropriate limit is set at £450.

Public authorities are required to estimate whether a request is likely to breach the 'appropriate limit' and where it does, to notify the applicant of the estimated costs and where available, the options to reduce those costs as may be required.

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Calculation of fees

The Trust will calculate the fees by estimating the time it will reasonably incur on the following activities:

• determining whether the information requested is held
• locating the information or documents containing the information
• retrieving such information or documents
• extracting the information from the document containing it (including editing or redacting information)

The standard hourly rate that all authorities must use to calculate the staff costs of answering requests is £25 per hour. 

There will be no fee to pay for requests for information that cost less than £450 or 18 working hours to complete.

The Trust is however entitled to make a charge to recover the cost of reproduction of the information and postage, which are referred to as disbursements costs and will do so if those costs exceed £15 in total.

If there is a fee to pay, you will be notified in writing, including the total cost and an explanation of how those costs have been calculated. The 20 day compliance time is suspended and reactivated upon receipt of payment.

The Trust will provide advice and assistance and discuss with the requester how the scope of their request could be narrowed in order to keep the fees as low as possible.

When the Trust has issued a fees notice, the applicant has three months to pay. The authority does not have to answer the request until payment has been received (section 9(2) of the Freedom of Information Act) and will consider the request to have been cancelled if payment is not forthcoming within three months after the fees notice is issued.

The Trust may not take into account any costs other than those set out in the Regulations. In particular it may not take account of the expected costs of:

• the time taken to check that a request for information meets the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act
• considering whether the information requested should be withheld in reliance on an exemption under the Act. This includes any costs incurred through seeking legal advice about whether exemptions apply
• considering whether a request is vexatious or a repeated request
• obtaining authorisation to send out the information
• the time taken to calculate any fee to be charged
• advice and assistance provided under section 16 of the Act.

If the applicant does not agree with the Trust's decision that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit, he or she can ask the Information Commissioner to investigate.

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Requests costing more than the appropriate limit

If a request would cost more than the appropriate limit to answer, the Trust is not obliged to answer it. However, the Trust will provide advice and assistance, so far as it is reasonable to do so, to the person who made the request to see if the question could be refined, or resubmitted in part, to bring it below the appropriate limit.

If after providing advice and assistance (as required under section 16) the request would still cost more than the appropriate limit to answer, the Trust will inform the applicant of this no later than the 20-day limit for answering requests. The Trust has a number of options:

• it can decide not to provide the information
• it can answer and charge a permitted fee calculated in accordance with the Fees Regulations, or
• it can answer without charging.

Aggregating requests

Where the Trust receives a number of requests from either the same person or different people asking for the same or similar information within a short time of each other, we may consider aggregating these requests to take an overall view of the resources which would have to be committed to answering all of the requests.

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When can you aggregate requests?

A public authority can only aggregate requests in the following circumstances:

• two or more requests for information have been made to the same public authority
• they must be either from the same person, or from 'different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign'
• the requests must relate to the same or similar information
• they must have been received by the public authority within a space of 60 consecutive working days

Data Protection Act 1998 requests for personal information

Personal data subject access requests are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act 2000 by virtue of section 40 and are dealt with under the Data Protection Act 1998 section 7.

The fees are prescribed in the Data Protection (Subject Access) (Fees and Miscellaneous Provisions) Regulations 2000 and the Data Protection (Subject Access) (Fees and Miscellaneous Provisions)(Amendment) Regulations 2001 SI 3223.

The same charging regime applies to requests for information under the Access to Health Records Act 1990. 

An initial non-refundable payment of £10 is payable upon application to cover the administration costs of identifying and locating the personal data requested.

No further fee is charged for the provision of that data in a permanent format if that personal data: 

1. consists entirely of computerised records, or
2. are not health records within the meaning of section 68(2) of the Act (although fees under FOI or EIR may still apply)

A further fee will be charged for a permanent copy of that data as follows:

A copy of all X-ray images provided on a CD	£10
A photocopy of an Emergency Department record	£10
A photocopy of a health records less than 15 pages	£10
A photocopy of an entire health record more than 15 pages	£40

These charges cover the costs of reproduction and secure postage. A fees notice will be issued to inform the applicant of the costs as per the procedures described in the Freedom of Information section. 

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Environmental Information Regulations 2005

Environmental information is exempt from the information the Freedom of Information Act by virtue of section 39 and are dealt with under the Environmental Regulations 2005 regime.

Unlike Freedom of Information, there is no "appropriate limit" in the Regulations, ad there is no requirement under regulation 12(4)(b) to answer a request that is 'manifestly unreasonable'. This would apply to requests which would have an unreasonable resource impact on the Trust.

The Trust  cannot make a charge for allowing an applicant:

• access to any public registers or lists of environmental information; or
• to examine the information (at a place chosen by the public authority).

For all other situations, charging is at the discretion of the public authority (any charge must be reasonable).

The Environmental Information Regulations 2004 state that public authorities may charge for environmental information and this charge should be "reasonable". An EIR request will be treated in exactly the same way as an FOI request if it falls below the appropriate limit of £450.

Disbursement costs for photocopying, printing and postage may be charged if they exceed £15. The applicant will be notified in writing if there is a fee to pay.

Unlike FOIA, a request for environmental information cannot be refused if it exceeds the appropriate limit. In such cases, the Trust will consider the request on its own merits and agree a course of action with the applicant, which may include a reasonable charge being made for the information. Again, the applicant will be notified in writing if there is a fee to pay.

For further information see: Information Commissioner's Guidance
Environmental Information Regulations - Charging for environmental information.

http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/environmental_info_reg/practical_application/charging_for_environmental_information_v1.pdf

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Mixed requests
A mixed request is a case in which part of the information requested is regulated by one access to information regime, and other parts by other information regimes.

Maximum fees will be determined according to each separate regime. For example, where a request is for a mixture of an applicant's own personal data, and other information to which the Freedom of Information Act applies, then the maximum fee will be the sum of the maximum subject access fee under the Data Protection Act and the maximum fee for providing the remainder of the information calculated under the freedom of information regime.

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Re-use of public sector information regulations

© Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust 2009

The information featured on this website is the copyright of Nottingham University Hospital NHS Trust unless otherwise indicated. You may re-use the information on this website free of charge in any format. Re-use includes copying, issuing copies to the public, publishing, broadcasting and translating into other languages. It also covers non-commercial research and study. Re-use is subject to the following conditions. You must:

• acknowledge the source and our copyright in cases where you supply the information to others;
• reproduce the information accurately;
• not use the information in a misleading way;
• not use the information for the principal purpose of advertising or promoting a particular product or service.

You may establish links to this website.

Further information about the public sector re-use information regulations can be found on the office of public sector information website.

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