Our Dental Practice Privacy Policy & Terms and conditions of The Site Respecting Your Privacy and the law
At Carrum Downs Dental Group, we are committed to respecting your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal information. Our dental practice is bound by relevant Health Privacy Principles in state legislation and Commonwealth National Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act (1988).
We are also bound by other applicable codes of conduct affecting your personal information, such as the Health Records Act 2001 (VIC) and the Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002 (NSW).
Our staff members are trained on best practices in accordance with the set standards, procedures, and policies to respect your privacy. We also review our privacy policies on a regular basis to keep up with policy changes.
About Our Privacy Policy
Our Privacy policy states how we manage your personal information. This includes a description of the sort of personal information that’s held, for what purposes, and how long the collected information is retained, used, and disclosed. This privacy policy applies to all dealings with our clinic. We encourage you to please ask at the practice or check our website for any updates to our privacy policy.
Collecting Your Personal Information
Our dental practice collects information from patients and carers or guardians directly. We collect this information when you or your guardian fills out an administrative form such as medical history forms or when you provide personal information on the counter, over the telephone, or on a website.
We collect information that may include your names, email or postal address, health fund membership, date of birth, health information, medicare card details, and any other information that our practice may consider necessary.
In specific cases, we may collect your personal information from third parties. For example, our clinic may collect information on your health and prior treatment from other health care practices and general medical practitioners to aid in your treatment plan.
Using and disclosing your personal information
At our dental practice, we only use health information to provide you with the needed healthcare. We can only use your information for other purposes if you have consented to it.
We may use your information for other purposes that you may have reasonably consistent with or when we are authorised and required by the law. We may also file or use your personal information to notify you about any developments, products, or services from our dental practice that might serve your needs. For example, we may send outpatient reminder notices. If you no longer wish us to contact you, you can request cancellation via the “Contact Us” option below.
Keep your personal information up to date and accurate
Our dental practice aims to make sure that any personal information we collect, use, or disclose is complete, up to date, and accurate. To achieve this, we take reasonable steps to ensure that’s the case so that we can provide you with the best healthcare.
In case of any changes in your health and medical information, you should notify the dental practice promptly. This includes medications and any natural alternatives you may be taking. Failure to provide this updated information may lead to the following but are not limited to:
We may not be able to provide the best health care;
You may suffer adverse outcomes or harm.
Please contact us below if you believe that your personal information is inaccurate,
incomplete, or out of date.
Protecting your personal information
Our dental practice may store your personal information in different ways, including electronic and paper forms. The security of your personal information is paramount to us, and we take all reasonable steps to protect it from loss, unauthorised access, misuse, modification, or disclosure. Here are some of the steps we take to protect your personal information:
- Confidential agreements for all of our employees
- Security policies for all document storage
- System access security measures
- Providing a discrete environment for all confidential discussions within the dental clinic
- Personal information transfers are only allowed when the initial seeking access provides written consent.
- Controlled access to all of our buildings
- Electronic records systems for records backups on cloud storage providers located outside Australia
- Taking necessary steps to ensure that offshore information transfers come with our obligations as specified by the Australian privacy laws.
Your privacy on the internet
Our websites
No intentional personal information collection is undertaken by secret means on our website.
Links to other sites
We have links to other sites that you may access by clicking on links in our content leading to external websites. These sites are not subject to our privacy standards, procedures, and policies. You will have to review those sites directly or contact them to ascertain their privacy procedures, policies, and standards.
Gaining access to your personal information
You are entitled to access the personal information that we may have collected. However, the access is subject to exceptions that are allowed by law. In case of any denial of access, we will give you specific reasons as to why. In some data access request cases, we may provide the information over the counter or by telephone. You will need a fully signed consent form to transfer our personal information from the practice. In this case, our staff will assist you with the appropriate arrangements.
Using Government Identifiers
We only use or disclose government identifiers when required or authorised by law and when you have given express consent to disclose the information to third parties. In certain circumstances, the clinic is required to collect government identifiers such as Vet affairs card numbers or Medicare numbers.
Dealing with us with a pseudonym or anonymously
You can deal with our clinic anonymously or under a pseudonym when it’s practicable and lawful to do so. We will still need to uniquely identify your dental records for future use, so you will need to remember your pseudonym details.
Resolving Your Privacy Issues
Our dental clinic provides various ways to resolve any issues you may have with our privacy policy. These include:
- You are always welcome to communicate directly with any member of our staff, and they will help you to the best of their abilities.
- You can talk to your treating dental practitioner to resolve your issue.
- You can contact the dental practice principal owner via the contact details provided on the website.
- If the issue is not resolved to your satisfaction via any of our communication channels, you can always let us know, and we will investigate the specific case and keep you advised of progress. If such channels still don’t bear any progress, the issue will be escalated to the appropriate channels to facilitate resolution.
Contacting Us
Our patients are advised to speak to the dental practitioner for more information regarding our privacy policy. We also provide contact details on this website. Please visit the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s website www.oaic.gov.au for all general information about privacy.
Website Privacy and Copyright
We are fully committed to respecting and protecting your privacy while on our website. Our policy statement explains how we use any information we collect on our website. Generally, we do not collect personal identifying information whenever you visit our site unless you choose to provide the information to our website. This process still makes sure that you don’t have to reveal who you are or any personally identifying information. We only receive information that depends on your interactions with our website.
Collecting your information
We do not collect personal information through this website as a standard practice. If for any reason, we end up collecting personal information on this website, we will expressly provide a purpose of use on the website.
Our dental clinic may offer the services of collecting address information changes and collecting personal information and medical history of any new patients. These services may or may not be provided on this site, and you are encouraged to contact us at the address provided on this page. If offered, the service is only intended for patients who have already booked an appointment with our dentists and have been advised of the availability of this service.
This website will generally communicate the information via standard encryption emails unless stated otherwise. We cannot guarantee that all data transmission over the internet will be 100% secure.
This website cannot give an absolute assurance that the information will be secure at all times. Accordingly, you do provide the information at your own risk, and the practice will not be held responsible for any events arising from unauthorized access to the information. The website’s databases will also not store information for further development use.
Statistics
Our web hosting company will automatically record information regarding your visit for statistical purposes. The information includes your server’s address, your domain name, date and time of your visit, the pages you accessed and specific documents you downloaded, previous web visits you may have visited, and the type of browser used to access the site. This information is used to assess the visitors’ traffic and discover what information is most relevant and how to improve other parts of the site to make them helpful to visitors.
Our website will not attempt to identify users and their browsing activities in the unlikely event of an investigation where law enforcement agencies can exercise a warrant to inspect the web hosting logs that may contain such information.
This website contains external links that we are not responsible for the privacy practices and content published on them. We encourage you to examine each website’s privacy policy and make your personal decision on the correctness of the information found and its reliability.
Security
The internet is not always a secure environment, and if you send us any information via your email address, it is at your own risk. All patient information forms and address changes are emailed directly to the clinic’s email address on standard protocols. The information is not permanently stirred on the web hosting company’s or developer’s database.
Any information collected by the dental practice is changeable and viewable at the dental practice. In case you are worried about the security or sensitivity of the information, kindly contact us directly via phone or pay us a visit.
We will not disclose or use personal information for other purposes without your express consent unless required to disclose by the law. If you believe that we have failed to adhere to the principles in this [privacy statement or you have any comments on the privacy policy, please get in touch with us @ [email protected]
Use of cookies
At the moment, our website does not use cookies. Cookies are small messages given to the web browser by a site’s server. Your browser stores these messages, and they are routinely sent to the server every time you request a web page from the same server. Cookies don’t store personal information unless you have expressly granted the information.
Most browsers are set up to auto-accept cookies. If you wish to stop receiving cookies, you can set your browser to reject all cookies or notify you each time a request to use cookies is made.
Please note that some browsers can allow cookie access from other servers besides the origin server. Feel free to contact us with any queries regarding how we handle your personal information and our privacy issues
Copyright
The information on this website is subject to Australian copyright laws.
Liability
We are not responsible to you or another party for losses suffered in connection with the use of any of this website and any of its contents. This includes but is not limited to any transmissions that might contain computer viruses.
The clinic makes no representations or warranties about this website or any of the content published on it. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we exclude any liability which may arise from the use of this website, its information, or the content on it. Where the liability cannot be excluded, any liability by us in relation to the usage of this website or its content is limited under the Trade Practices Act 1974 (S68A). The clinic will never be held liable for any indirect, special, incidental, or consequential loss that arises from the use of this website, including but not limited to loss of business profits and medical and health consequences.
Our Intellectual Property
Some of the content published on this website may be owned by someone else’s copyright and is included under a license or agreement. You may only use the content for non-commercial use or access it for personal use unless you have written approval from us. Any content on this website can be printed for your personal use.
All other uses that may include copying and reproduction of this website or any parts of its content are prohibited to the extent permitted by law. None of the content published on this website may be reproduced on another website. If you seek to use the content in any other way, it’s your responsibility to obtain prior approval where necessary.
Links from this website
Our web pages contain external links to other websites that we have no control ove3r. We make no representations of the accuracy of any information found on these websites. We are not liable for any content on these websites.
If you have any questions or comments on our privacy policy, feel free to get in touch with us on the “contact us” page, and we will get back to you promptly.