PHU Acute Admissions Policy

This website publishes the Acute Admissions Policy and the emergency prompt cards of Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust. It is provided and run by Medical Simulation Services Limited (company number 11328898, registered in England and Wales), which is the data controller for the personal data held here and is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (registration number ZC253327).

It was built and is run by Dr Ben Atkinson, an Emergency Medicine Consultant in Portsmouth, who is the director responsible for data protection and your point of contact. The website is not hosted on NHS infrastructure.

No patient data is held here. The site holds clinical guidance and the details of the staff who write, review and suggest changes to it. Please never enter anything that could identify a patient.

Data protection contact: [email protected]. Questions about the policy itself: [email protected].

People who suggest a change to the policy: your name (optional), email address and role (optional), your suggestion, and our replies.

People who suggest a prompt card: your name, role and NHS email address if you give them (all optional), your idea, and a one-way scrambled code made from your connection so that each person's “+1” counts once.

People invited to write a prompt card: your name, your email address if given, and the form you send, which becomes part of the card's records.

Card owners, authors and reviewers: names, roles and work email addresses on each card, and who edited, reviewed and approved each version and when.

Administrators: name, work email address, role, password (stored only as a one-way hash), two-factor login details, failed login attempts, when you last logged in and last used the admin pages, and the changes you make.

Everyone: the website's servers record technical details such as your connection's network address briefly, to protect the site from misuse.

• To reply to suggestions and tell you what happened to them.
• To write, review, approve and keep prompt cards up to date, including review reminders to card owners.
• To keep an accurate record of who changed the policy and the cards, and when, as clinical governance requires.
• To run the admin area securely.

Your data is never used for marketing and never sold.

We rely on legitimate interests: publishing safe, current clinical guidance for the Emergency Department, responding to the staff who help improve it, and keeping a proper governance record. We hold only what's needed for that, and you can object at any time (see Your rights).

We don't sell or share your data. These services handle it on our behalf:

• Cloudflare protects the website and carries its traffic.
• Our email provider sends replies, invitations and reminders.
• Anthropic (the Claude AI service) receives the clinical guidance documents and card forms that editors choose to send it, to lay out cards. These are guidance, not patient data, but can include an author's name. Anthropic does not use them to train its models.
• Storj stores encrypted backups of the database.

Where any of these services handle data outside the UK, they do so under the UK's approved safeguards for international transfers.

The website and its database run on a server in the UK managed by Medical Simulation Services Limited. Backups are encrypted before they leave the server and are stored with Storj. If hosting moves (for example to Microsoft Azure data centres in the UK), this notice will be updated first.

• Suggestions, card ideas and invitations: your name and email address are kept for 12 months (for suggestions, from the last reply), then removed automatically. Only your role is kept, for example “Band 5 nurse”.
• Card records and the policy change log: the names of card owners, authors, reviewers and approvers, and who changed what, are kept as clinical governance records for as long as the policy and cards are in use, and for a period afterwards as records management requires.
• Administrator accounts: while you need access, then deleted.
• Backups: kept for a limited period, then deleted in rotation.

Visitors to the public pages get no tracking or advertising cookies. Administrators get one cookie that keeps them logged in (for 12 hours from their last activity). Some forms save what you've typed in your own browser so it isn't lost if the page reloads; it stays on your device.

You can ask for a copy of your data, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, ask us to restrict how we use it, or object to our using it. Email [email protected] and we'll reply within one month. Some governance records can't be deleted while a card or policy entry they relate to is in use, and we'll explain if that applies.

If you're unhappy with how we handle your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113.

We'll update this notice if how we handle data changes, and show the date at the top.