The Australian Aged Care Group recognises that your privacy is important and is committed to ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of your personal information. As part of our longstanding commitment to safeguarding your right to privacy, the Australian Aged Care Group has implemented a program to ensure compliance with all applicable Commonwealth and State privacy laws and a range of existing legal and ethical obligations regarding privacy, security and confidentiality of personal information.

The following statement explains how the Australian Aged Care Group manages personal information. This Privacy Statement is general in nature; however, you may request a more detailed statement regarding any particular aspect of our business.

This Privacy Statement applies to all entities that comprise the Australian Aged Care Group.

Collection of Information

We need to collect a range of personal information depending upon the services provided or requested by you or the nature of your dealings with us. The information may be collected by our organisation in the capacity as a provider of aged care services, or as an employer.

Personal information is any information or an opinion that, directly or indirectly, identifies a person such as a person’s name, address date of birth or Medicare number. It can also include bank account details, tax file number and other financial information. The definition of personal information also encompasses health information and sensitive information.

The type of health information we collect includes information about a person’s health or disability, and any health service that is provided to a person. It covers information that may be stored in paper form (such as medical records and reports), electronically or visually (such as x-rays).

We may also collect sensitive information such as details of a person’s race or religion.

All personal information collected by the Australian Aged Care Group will be collected by fair and lawful means.

Use and Disclosure of Information

We collect personal information that is necessary:

• To provide services appropriate to the residents and employees of our aged care facilities.
• To meet legislative and regulatory requirements of an approved provider under the Aged care Act 1997 (for example, Australian Federal Police Checks); for us to hold as an employer.

The Australian Aged Care Group will not sell, rent or trade personal information to or with third parties. Parties to whom the organisation may be required to disclose personal information include:

• When you have consented to the disclosure or a competent person with appropriate authority has consented, to the disclosure on your behalf.
• When the disclosure is in accordance with, or directly related to, the purpose for which we collected the information. For example, we may disclose a resident’s health information to a health professional if the information is needed to treat that resident.

When specialised functions as part of our health services are performed by parties outside the Australian Aged Care Group, such as where one of our facilities outsources those functions. The Australian Aged Care Group takes reasonable steps when contracting with those third parties to ensure that your personal information is handled in accordance with this policy and all applicable privacy laws.

• When we have a legal obligation to disclose personal information such as to government agencies (including the Australian Taxation Office, Medicare, and or Centrelink) or as required under health regulations, or where such disclosure is permitted by law (including under privacy law).

Quality, Storage and Security of Personal Information

The Australian Aged Care Group will take reasonable steps to ensure the information we hold is accurate, complete and up-to-date as well as relevant to the function for which it is held. We also safeguard the security of personal information we hold. We may store personal information electronically on our computer databases as well as in hard copy documents kept at our premises. We have procedures to ensure that your personal information is protected from unauthorised access, use, modification or disclosure. Our employees are provided with access to personal information on a ‘need to know’ basis.

Access and Correction

You can contact our organisation if you would like details of your personal information, which we may hold, about you or if you would like us to correct it.

To ensure the integrity and safety of personal information, the Australian Aged Care Group will only disclose to you such information if our internal procedures and satisfied. Depending on the nature of your request, we may ask you to complete a personal information request form. In certain cases we may charge you a fee for this service but we will inform you at the time.

Except for certain special circumstances, individuals have the right to request access to their personal information and have that information corrected or annotated if it is inaccurate, misleading, incomplete or out of date.