Privacy and cookies

Privacy of your information

NHS England uses personal and confidential information for a number of purposes. Our privacy notice provides a summary of how we use your information.

Website privacy

Information on this page explains our website privacy policy and how we will use and protect any information about you that you give us when you visit this website.

This privacy statement only covers the NHS England website (www.england.nhs.uk). It does not cover all sites that can be linked to from this site, so you should always be aware when you are moving to another site and read the privacy statement on that site.

What information do we collect?

From time to time, you will be asked to submit personal information about yourself (e.g. name and email address) in order to receive or use services on our website. Such services include bulletins, email updates and website feedback.

By entering your details in the fields requested, you enable NHS England and its service providers to provide you with the services you select. Any information you provide to NHS England will only be used by us, our agents and service providers and will not be disclosed unless we are obliged or permitted to by law to do so.

If you post or send offensive, inappropriate or objectionable content anywhere on www.england.nhs.uk or otherwise engage in any disruptive behaviour on www.england.nhs.uk, we may use whatever information is available to us, about you, to stop such behaviour. We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as you use the service you have requested, and remove it in the event that the purpose has been met or when you no longer wish to continue your subscription.

The Data Protection Act

Under the Data Protection Act, we have a legal duty to protect any information we collect from you. We use leading technologies and encryption software to safeguard your data and keep strict security standards to prevent any unauthorised access to it.
We do not pass on your details to any third party or other government department.

Changes to our policy

If our privacy policy changes in any way, we will place an updated version on this page. Regularly reviewing the page ensures you are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances, if any, we will share it with other parties.

Security

This site has security measures in place to protect the loss and alteration of information under our control.

Use of cookies

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.

These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:

  • Enabling a service to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information several times during one task
  • Recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested
  • Measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are fast.

You can manage these small files yourself through your browser setting.

Please note that the cookie providers listed below may distribute the gathered cookie information with other third party websites for the purpose of activity tracking. You can find out more about the policy of each cookie provider on their respective privacy pages.

Current cookies

Please by aware that the providers listed below may change their cookie names without notice.
As an example, we use the following cookies on our website:

Cookie: Google Analytics
Example name: _utma, _utmb, _utmc, _utmz, GAPS, LSID, LSOSID, OTZ
Purpose:   These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our site, which we use to help improve it. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the site, where visitors have come to the site from and the pages they visited. These cookies may also be identified as originating from england.nhs.uk More information about Google cookies.

Cookie: www.google.com (Google embedded search)
Example name: __utmx, __utmxx, APISID, HSID, NID, PREF, SAPISID, SID, SSID
Purpose: These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our site, which we use to help improve it. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the site, where visitors have come to the site from and the pages they visited and what they have searched for. More information about Google cookies.

Cookie: www.events.england.nhs.uk
Example name: PHPSESSID
Purpose: To track visitor information and for security authentication.

Embedded content

We want to provide interesting and engaging content on our website. On a number of pages we use ‘plug ins’ or embedded media. For example, we embed YouTube videos in many pages. We also provide links to share content with popular social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

The suppliers of these services may also set cookies on your device when you visit the pages where we have used this type of content. These are known as ‘third-party’ cookies. Third party cookies are delivered on behalf of their respective organisations and as such they may change their name and purpose from the cookies identified below, this is beyond the control of NHS England.

Cookie: Ustream
Example name: ab_test_1, ab_test_2, locale, optimizelyBuckets, optimizelyEndUserId, optimizelySegments, uTrack, ul, ustream-guest, _qca, PHPSESSID
Purpose: Used  to enable certain features of the services, to better understand how you interact with the services in-order to deliver a better service.  Also used to monitor aggregate usage by users and monitor web traffic on the service.  More information about Ustream cookies.

Cookie: scorecardresearch.com
Example name: UID, UIDR
Purpose: Used by Ustream video streaming (as described above), to better understand how you interact with their services in-order to deliver a better service. Also used to monitor aggregate usage by users and monitor web traffic on the service. More information about scoreandsearch.com cookies.

Cookie: YouTube
Example name: PREF, VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE, use_hitbox
Purpose: To track visitor views, and to remember user preferences when viewing YouTube videos embedded in our website web pages.   More information about YouTube cookies.

Cookie: Twitter
Example name: guest_id, remember_checked, remember_checked_on, secure_sessions, twll
Purpose: To track visitor information and for security authentication. More information about Twitter cookies.

Cookie: LinkedIn
Example name: csrftoken, L1e, visit, PHPSESSID
Purpose: To track visitor information and for security authentication. More information about LinkedIn cookies.

How to control and delete cookies

We will not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information about you.

However, if you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by our websites, or indeed any other website, you can do this through your browser settings. The ‘Help’ function within your browser should tell you how.

Alternatively, you may wish to visit www.aboutcookies.org which contains comprehensive information on how to do this on a wide variety of browsers. You will also find details on how to delete cookies from your machine as well as more general information about cookies.

Please be aware that restricting cookies may impact on the functionality of our website.

If you wish to view your cookie code, just click on a cookie to open it. You’ll see a short string of text and numbers. The numbers are your identification card, which can only be seen by the server that gave you the cookie.

For information on how to do this on the browser of your mobile phone you will need to refer to your handset manual.

To opt-out of third-parties collecting any data regarding your interaction on our website, please refer to their websites for further information.

Contact us

If you have any questions about these terms and conditions or the practices of this website, please email us at england.contactus@nhs.net