Primary Care Sheffield operates a service called Clinical Assessment Service, Education, Support and Self-management (CASES). PCS works with Sheffield Teaching Hospitals (STH) to provide support to GPs when they refer patients to one of 7 outpatient departments in STH. If your GP has signed up to use CASES, their referrals will be passed to PCS’ reviewing GPs to provide an assessment of your referral; this will result in the reviewing GP either sending your referral on to STH to manage or passing your referral back to your GP with support or advice. Our reviewing GPs will read your GP’s referral and any supportive information provided.

The 7 outpatient departments we review referrals for are: Cardiology, Dermatology, Ear Nose and Throat, Gastroenterology, Gynaecology, Respiratory and Urology.

The information we hold

We will keep records of presenting symptoms and advice offered in order to track thematic changes required in either educational content to GPs or in pathway / service redesign required to better support patient care. These records help to provide us with information for system improvements in Sheffield and do not include your name.

Records we may hold about you include:

• Your age and NHS number
• Details of referrals (but not the actual letters)
• Records of any advice offered to your registered GP

Additional Information Sharing from our CASES team

We will provide the CCG with pseudonymised data for the purpose of contract monitoring. This will be processed using software managed by an agreed third party provider who will not retain details.

 Data Retention

We will retain a record of the information detailed above for 10 years, where after it will be destroyed.