Health and Social Care Act 2008

80 Code of practice on confidential personal information

(1) The Commission must prepare and publish a code in respect of the practice it proposes to follow in relation to confidential personal information.

(2) The code must in particular make provision—

(a) about the obtaining by the Commission of information which, once obtained, will be confidential personal information, and

(b) about the handling, use and disclosure by the Commission of confidential personal information.

(3) Before publishing the code, the Commission must consult—

(a) the National Information Governance Board for Health and Social Care, and

(b) such other persons as it considers appropriate.

(4) The Commission must keep the code under review and, if it considers it appropriate, from time to time publish a revised code (and references in this section to the code include any revised code).

(5) In this section “confidential personal information” means information which—

(a) is obtained by the Commission on terms or in circumstances requiring it to be held in confidence, and

(b) relates to and identifies an individual.

(6) For the purposes of subsection (5)(b), information obtained by the Commission is to be treated as identifying an individual if the individual can be identified from a combination of—

(a) the information, and

(b) other information obtained by the Commission.