Privacy notice

In providing your dental care and treatment, we will ask for information about you and your health. Occasionally, we may receive information from other providers who have been involved in your care. This privacy notice describes the personal information we hold, why we hold it and what we do with it. It applies to all dental practices operated by Nationwide Healthcare Providers Ltd.

Who we are

The data controller is Nationwide Healthcare Providers Ltd (NHPL), which operates NHS and private dental practices across the UK. Those who have access to your information include the dentists and other dental professionals involved in your care and treatment, and the reception staff responsible for the management and administration of your practice.

Our Data Protection Officer, Tina Bentley, ensures that we collect, use, store and dispose of your information responsibly and in line with data protection law. You can contact our Data Protection Officer by email at thepracticemanager@7dental.co.uk or by phone on 0115 979 0909.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) under registration reference ZA195962.

Information we hold

We hold personal information about you including your name, date of birth, National Insurance number, NHS number, address, telephone number and email address. This allows us to fulfil our contract with you to provide appointments, and to send you reminders and recall appointments — we have a legitimate interest in ensuring your continuing care and making you aware of our services.

We hold information about your dental and general health, such as:

• Clinical records made by dentists and other dental professionals involved in your care and treatment
• X-rays, clinical photographs, digital scans of your mouth and teeth, and study models
• Medical and dental histories
• Treatment plans and consent
• Notes of conversations with you about your care
• Dates of your appointments
• Details of any complaints you have made and how they were dealt with
• Correspondence with you and with other health professionals or institutions

We hold information about the fees we have charged, the amounts you have paid and some payment details. This forms part of our contractual obligation to provide your dental care and allows us to meet legal financial requirements. Where your dental care is provided under the terms of the NHS, we are required to complete statutory forms so that payments can be processed.

Information you send through this website

When you use our contact form we collect your name, email address, phone number (optional), the practice you are enquiring about, and the content of your message. We use these details to respond to your enquiry and to pass them to the relevant practice so they can contact you directly. Our web server also records basic access logs (IP address, browser type, pages visited, date and time) solely for security monitoring; these are not linked to contact-form data. We will not use your details for marketing without your explicit consent.

How we use your information

• To provide the dental care and treatment you need, for which we require accurate, up-to-date information about you.
• We share your information with the NHS in connection with your dental treatment.
• We may contact you to carry out patient surveys, or to ask whether you were happy with your treatment, for quality-control purposes.
• We operate CCTV at our practices for the purposes of patient and staff safety.

Our lawful bases

Under UK GDPR we rely on the following lawful bases for processing your personal data:

• Contract — to provide the dental care, appointments and treatment you have asked for.
• Legitimate interests — to ensure your continuing care, the quality of our treatment, the effective running of our practices, and to respond to enquiries you send us.
• Legal obligation — to meet NHS statutory requirements and our legal financial obligations.

Information about your health is "special category" data. We process it under Article 9(2)(h) of the UK GDPR — the provision of health care and treatment.

Who we share your data with

We share your data only where necessary:

• The NHS — in connection with your dental treatment, including the statutory forms required for NHS payments.
• The relevant practice — your enquiry details are shared with the NHPL practice you are contacting so they can respond to you.
• Brevo — our transactional email provider, acting as a data processor under a data processing agreement, used to deliver website contact-form enquiries to the practice by email. Brevo processes data within the EU/EEA.
• Other health professionals or institutions, where this is necessary for your care.

We do not sell your personal data or share it with third parties for marketing purposes.

How long we keep your data

We retain your clinical dental records in line with NHS and professional dental record-keeping requirements. Enquiries sent through this website that do not lead to a patient relationship are kept only as long as necessary to deal with your enquiry, and are then deleted.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to:

• Access — request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Rectification — ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data.
• Erasure — ask us to delete your data where there is no legitimate reason to retain it.
• Restriction — ask us to restrict processing in certain circumstances.
• Objection — object to processing based on legitimate interests.
• Portability — receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format.

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

Cookies

This website uses essential technical cookies required for it to function (for example, security tokens). With your consent, we use Google Analytics to understand how visitors use the site so we can improve it — analytics cookies are only set after you accept them via our cookie banner, and you can decline without affecting how the site works. Our practice pages also embed Google Maps to help you find us; when a map is displayed, Google may set its own cookies and receive your IP address, in accordance with Google's privacy policy. We do not use cookies for advertising.

Contact us about your data

To exercise any of your rights, or for any data protection query, contact our Data Protection Officer, Tina Bentley, by email at thepracticemanager@7dental.co.uk or by phone on 0115 979 0909. You can also reach our patient relations team at patientrelationsteam@nhpl.co.uk. We aim to respond within one month, in line with UK GDPR.