Quality, privacy and your rights
We aim to give you the best care
At Fertility Associates we benchmark against international best practice and take all practical measure to ensure quality, safety and privacy in all our practices.
We aim to provide the best possible care, and we want to know if you feel there are things we could do better. We also like to know when you’re pleased with our services too! We appreciate all your feedback, which can be submitted using our online patient survey form.
If the care you receive is not to the standard you expected, please contact the Clinic Manager of your clinic so that any concerns can be addressed promptly. We respond to all complaints. If you are not satisfied with all our attempts to resolve the problem, we can help you contact an advocate associated with the Health and Disability Commission. Your feedback will not affect your treatment at our clinics in any way.
Our mission and quality policy
Our mission statement is, ‘Working together, we will give you the best chance of a healthy child through excellent care and world-class technology’.
We, the directors and staff, are personally responsible for the quality of your care, your safety, and optimising your chance of success. Each year we set ourselves goals - personally and as a company – so that we continually improve.
Security
We have put in rigorous steps to keep your medical information secure and intact, ranging from computer firewalls to checking letters before they go into envelopes, and we regularly audit our systems. However, we know that lapses can occasionally happen despite best intents and efforts. If you receive any information that is not yours, please notify us immediately. We will try to find the root cause of any breach to prevent it happening again.
Privacy
Privacy is important at Fertility Associates. We have a number of policies in place around the following:
Collecting and disclosing information
Medical records
Quality audits
Security
Future contact.
Collecting and disclosing information
We only collect information that’s relevant to the services we provide. If we require extra information, i.e. from a previous fertility provider, your GP, or another health service, we will get your permission first. We will also ask permission before we pass on information. In our patient registration form we ask if we can:
send copies of letters to your referring doctor and/or GP
share information between partners.
However, we may need to give some limited information when we arrange other medical services, such as blood tests or ultrasound scans. For instance, a request for a hormone test may state something like ‘ectopic pregnancy,’ so the laboratory makes the right interpretation of the result.
Health Information
As part of consultation and treatment, you agree that we may disclose relevant personal and health information:
to service providers such as pathology labs, radiographers and allied health professionals.
where it is required by regulations, such as to an ethics committee.
Some consultation and treatment information may be held by associated providers, such the company providing the patient app, Salve. Fertility Associates assesses the security and confidentiality of each provider. Providers such as Salve will also ask for your agreement when you download the app.
Your medical records may be read by external auditors in the process of accreditation and certification of Fertility Associates. The auditors agree to preserve patient confidentiality and privacy. Non-identifying information may be used for analysis and improvement.
We may also provide your name in relation to billing or debt recovery, but we do not disclose what the debt was related to.
The Health Information Privacy Code makes allowance for disclosure of information in exceptional circumstances, when doing so is necessary to prevent or lessen a serious and imminent threat to public health or safety – but it is unlikely that this will ever be required with respect to fertility care.
Our staff have a responsibility to respect the confidentiality and sensitivity of any personal information collected about your health – we abide by the Privacy Act 2020 and the Health Information Privacy Code 1994. Only authorised staff have access to your records.
Our staff, contractors and auditors sign a confidentiality agreement, protecting the identity of our patients at all times.
If you are a donor or are using donor sperm, eggs or embryos or surrogacy, we are obliged by law to obtain additional information. This is explained further in our booklet ‘Pathway to a Child’.
If you are a donor whose sperm, eggs or embryos give rise to a pregnancy, or a person who has a pregnancy arising from donated sperm, eggs or embryos or from surrogacy, then we are obliged by law to provide Births, Deaths and Marriages with a particular set of information – this is explained in our patient information packages and our consent forms.
Future contact
Our consent forms for treatment ask whether we can contact you in the future to see if you are interested in taking part in research. About 80% of people agree to this, for which we are very thankful. This has been extremely valuable for following up on the health of children born after fertility treatment.
If you do not agree to follow-up for research, we would only contact you if it was about a matter which could affect your or your children’s health or well-being.