Treatment:

Your privacy is always paramount to us. During your appointment, our therapist may need you to remove items of clothing in order to access the part of your body needing treatment. Only the areas necessary for assessment and treatment will be exposed. Underwear must be worn at all times during your appointment. We have shorts and singlet tops in each clinic, should you need them. We have curtained and private rooms available. At all times, clients and therapists should be comfortable in the treatment setting.

 

Information:

In the course of providing treatment, Sport & Spinal Physiotherapy collects a range of health and related information about our clients that we consider sensitive. The practice has a policy that covers how your health information is collected, used, stored, disclosed and accessed.

The practice only collects information that is necessary to provide a quality health service. In the course of providing this service, we may disclose information to your current treating doctors.  The client needs to inform the practice if they do not want their health information provided to these health providers.

In accordance with privacy legislation, clients are entitled to access any information that we hold about them. In the initial circumstance, the request needs to be in writing and addressed to the practice principal or practice manager, stating the reason that they require their file to be copied.

We release some health and billing information to health insurers, third party insurers and workers compensation authorities in order to meet their requirements for claim assessment and payment. If clients ask to withhold certain information this may have an impact on their insurance claim. The practice will only release additional information to other parties including insurance companies, if the client provides permission for the information to be released.

For the practice to release information to a third party, we need to know which records a client would like us to release or withhold. In this case, any request to release information should specify dates where possible.

The privacy policy also applies to all employees. Employees are not permitted to access client files or collect information of clients for their own personal and/or financial gain. This includes phone numbers, email addresses and home residential addresses.

Employees may access the files of their own current clients during the course of treatment to write clinical notes that pertain to recent appointments. Employees may not access client files who are being treated by other therapists, unless they have an appointment with that client and access should only be necessary within 3- 5 days of that appointment.

On some occasions, a senior therapist may access clinical notes of clients being treated by junior therapists when a junior therapist instigates an ad-hoc case conference with the senior therapist for the purpose of improving the health outcomes of that client. Otherwise, the practice clinical educator may also access the clinical notes of clients being treated by junior therapists at our weekly case conference meetings when the junior therapists wants to improve the health outcomes of a client.

In the interests of maintaining our client's privacy, we regularly conduct an audit of our employee's access and activity in relation to our client files on our database. This audit monitors their digital activity within our client management software as well as other related software used to manage client information.

We may contact clients from time to time regarding current or new services we offer or with information related to physiotherapy, group classes and massage,  that we feel may interest them. If clients do not want to receive particular types of information, they can unsubscribe from our newsletter at any time.

To ensure that we continue to improve our privacy processes, we encourage clients to raise any concerns that they may have regarding privacy with the practice principal or practice manager.