Privacy Policy

At the Far North Fertility (FNF) our primary concern is providing you with treatment and healthcare of the highest quality. This requires a relationship of trust and confidentiality – one where we treat your personal health information appropriately and respect your privacy.

As such, we will handle your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy and in compliance with our obligations under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act) and, to the extent applicable, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Our fertility specialists, nurses, scientists, counsellors and administration staff work together to provide your fertility treatment. They may need access to your personal health information to make sure we provide the most appropriate care.

You are entitled to know what personal information is held about you, how you can access it, why it is held, to whom we may disclose it, and when we need your consent to do this. This Policy explains all these details. You can discuss any issue relating to the privacy of your information with your doctor or any staff member, at any time.

Collecting Information

Our fertility specialists and staff collect information that helps us provide the level of advice, care and management you need, or where there is a statutory requirement for collection.

This information may include:

contact details and date of birth

relationship status

medical history

family medical history

symptoms, diagnosis and recommended treatment

ethnicity

Medicare/private health fund details, and

billing or account details

We normally collect this information directly from you, but we may need to get it from other sources – for example, from other medical practitioners, health funds or health providers and, with your consent, from family members.

Purposes for Handling your Information

To ensure we provide you with the most appropriate treatment, our fertility specialists and staff may collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information for any of the following purposes:

sharing your information within the treatment team;

communicating with the referring medical practitioners;

referrals to other medical practitioners, hospitals or health providers;

referring specimens to external laboratories for analysis;

accounts and billing, including Medicare and private health insurance claims;

managing our practice – including quality assurance, practice accreditation, market analysis, assurance of our cybersecurity and keeping our records up to date;

complaints and incident handling, and notifications to our insurers;

disclosure, where legally required, to third parties – for example, in response to a court subpoena, any medical negligence claim or for mandatory reporting of specific diseases;

disclosure to our service providers, where doing so is necessary for your treatment or for our management and administrative purposes such as support and maintenance services on software and systems;

providing a small sample of case-notes for confidential review as part of annual Code of Practice audits by the national Reproductive Technology Accreditation Committee (RTAC), or its agents, in compliance with regulatory requirements;

sharing your information with our clinical review committee (which has members who are not part of the Far North Fertility), if necessary, so that they can determine if you meet our treatment guidelines; and

submitting a summary to the Australia and New Zealand Assisted Reproduction Database (ANZARD) of every treatment we perform. This information may be further supplied to other government and statutory bodies, all in compliance with regulatory requirements. In all these cases we remove any information that personally identifies you.

We may also use non-identifying information from your medical file for data analysis and research.

If you request us to send materials related to your treatment to another country, we will be required to disclose your personal information to people in that country.

The diagnosis and treatment of infertility often involves more than one person (for example, your partner, donors or surrogates). Where you are undergoing treatment with a partner, it is our policy to share all your information with your partner UNLESS you tell us not to disclose your information to your partner.

Data Quality and Security

We take all reasonable steps to ensure the personal information we collect, use, hold or disclose is accurate, complete, up-to-date and relevant to the functions and services we provide. You can help us achieve this by providing correct and up-to-date information, as described in our Patient Rights and Responsibilities document. When we exchange your personal information internally, we will do so via encrypted emails where possible. If you ask us to exchange your personal information with an external party, we may send your personal information by unencrypted (ie, normal) email to ensure that the external recipient can access this information.

We store your personal information securely and protect it from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.

Access and Correction

In all but a few rare cases, you can access the personal information we hold about you, in part or in full, or ask us to provide it to a third party such as another healthcare provider. The parent, guardian, attorney, authorised representative of, or responsible person for, a child or other person under care can also request access to personal information that relates to that child or other person under care. Access to personal information may also be provided under a "permitted general situation" or a "permitted health situation" as defined in the Privacy Act 1988. We may require you to make this request in writing. There may be an administration fee for this service, depending on the nature of access required.

If you feel any of the personal information we hold about you, is inaccurate or incomplete, please let us know. It is our policy to note your corrections and add them to your records. In accordance with good clinical practice, we do not erase the original record.

Our Website

Our website uses "cookies", which are pieces of data that are stored on your hard drive containing details about your use of our website. Cookies do not provide us with information about you that can be used to identify you, rather, they anonymously track usage of our website, so that we can enhance users' experience of our website. You may elect to reject cookies and still use our website, however in doing so, you may be unable to access certain pages.

Remarketing with Google Analytics

The Far North Fertility website uses analytics data and the double click cookie to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to our website. You have the ability to opt out of the double click cookie by visiting the Google advertising opt-out page or by opting out of Google Analytics by visiting the Google Analytics opt-out page.

If you would like to know more about remarketing you can view Google’s Remarketing Privacy Guidelines, Policies and Restrictions pages.

For what purposes do we collect, hold, and use your personal and health information?

Your personal and health information is collected and used to ensure you can be informed about the services that we provide, that you receive the best possible care if you become a patient of one of the entities under the Far North Fertility, and for us to manage the health services we provide to you effectively. It will also be used to:

send communications (including results) to you and your treating doctors

provide information and advice

conduct business processing functions

update our records and keep your contact details up to date

respond to any complaint made by you

comply with any law, rule, regulation, lawful and binding determination, decision or direction of a regulator, or in co-operation with any governmental authority

It will also be used internally for the administrative, marketing, planning, product or service development, quality control and research purposes of Far North Fertility and its related bodies corporate.

Retention of Records

To ensure we comply with regulatory requirements, it is our policy to keep your medical records for at least seven years.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may make changes to this Privacy Policy at any time without notice to you. At any time, our current Privacy Policy is available on our website.

Complaints

We want to make sure your expectations about your privacy protection are the same as ours. If you have any concerns, please discuss them with your doctor or any member of our staff.