How we use this information
This information is used to ensure that health, social care and public health services address local health needs and are focused on reducing health inequalities (differences in levels of ill health and premature deaths between groups and areas).
The primary use of data (for direct care services)
This is where a service collects and uses information that identifies individual residents and users of public health services in Lambeth and is known as personal data. This personal data is required to enable us to carry out specific functions and services. There are five public health functions we must deliver by law that can involve the collection of personal data, which are:
- helping protect people from the dangers of communicable diseases and environmental threats
- organising and paying for sexual health services
- providing specialist public health advice to primary care services: for example GPs and community health professionals
- organising and paying for height and weight checks for primary school children
- organising and paying for regular health checks for people from Lambeth
Secondary use of data
The Public Health Directorate also uses data and information as part of the planning, commissioning and monitoring of services. We do this to help ensure that services meet the needs of people now and in the future, we take steps to improve and protect the public’s health, we work to reduce inequalities in health outcomes and support our local NHS commissioners.
Examples of our work include producing assessments of the health and care needs of the population, in particular, to support the statutory responsibilities of:
- the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA)
- the Director of Public Health’s Annual report
- the local Health and Wellbeing Strategy
- identifying priorities for local action
- informing decisions on (for example) the design and commissioning of services
- assessing the performance of the local health and care system to evaluate and develop them
- reporting summary statistics to national organisations
- undertaking equity analysis of trends, particularly for vulnerable groups
- supporting clinical audits
- providing the mandated healthcare public health advice service to the local Clinical Commissioning Group
In secondary use cases, the information is used in such a way that individuals cannot be identified and personal identifiable details are removed as soon as possible in the processing of the data. Further, results are presented at a summary, or aggregated to a level to prevent identification, particular where a condition is rare and the numbers in the population are small.
Anonymised data is information that does not identify an individual directly and which cannot reasonably be used to determine identity. Anonymisation does not allow information about the same individual to be linked in the same way that pseudonymisation does and is, therefore, more likely to be used for ‘one-off queries’ of data rather than consistent trend analysis.
Pseudonymisation (also known as de-identification) refers to the process of replacing personally identifiable information relating to a patient/service user with an alternative ‘identifier’ (such as a randomised reference number instead of their unique NHS number), so that their data can be analysed appropriately (for example as part of trend analysis) without their personally identifiable data being disclosed unnecessarily.
Personally identifiable data relates to any data that could potentially identify a specific individual, such as name, date of birth, gender, address, postcode and NHS number.