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OH Assessment Consent

MORECONTACT

OH Assessment Consent

First level of consent (your responsibility)

It is important you, as the Referring Manager, should ensure that you have spoken to the employee about the referral, explained to them what the role is of Everwell Occupational Health, why you believe a referral may be relevant for them and you have checked that they do not object to the referral being made.

This upfront dialogue serve two purposes, firstly it reduces the risk of the person not attending an appointment that has been arranged (and thus incurring a cost and potentially wasting your time) and secondarily more importantly, you will need to share their personal information with Everwell. If you don’t have their consent, then you would be breaching their data privacy rights by sharing this information. This conversation is also an ideal opportunity to check with them what contact phone number they would prefer Everwell to use and/or they have a video enabled phone/similar for a video consultation (if appropriate) or other similar details.

Consultation and Issue of report Consent (Everwell’s responsibility)

At the beginning of a consultation, the Everwell clinician will check the person is aware why they are being referred and that they are happy to proceed; in effect, double checking the above. The consultation then proceeds and during the consultation the person will be asked for their consent to release the Occupational Health Report following the appointment. The individual is given 3 options for the release of the report:

  1. Not to see the report and simply issue to the referring Manager.
  2. To see a copy of the report but release a copy to the referring Manager at the same time.
  3. To see a copy of the report in Advance of issuing to the referring Manager.

The third option, seeing the report in advance, does allow the individual to request factual amendments (NOT clinical opinion amendments ) to the report. If this option is chosen, Everwell will also seek further positive consent to release the report to the referring Manager. Everwell’s CHARM portal is designed to automatically prompt and send reminders to the individual for them to give their positive consent in the shortest time scales.

Withdrawing Consent

Everwell’s Occupational Health reporting is governed, not only by Data Protection (GDPR) but also the General Medical Council (GMC) consent guidelines. Both these specifically allow an individual to withdraw their consent at any time (before the report has been issued). Luckily, it is extremely rare for consent to be withdrawn at a late stage and this issue does not arise very often.

It is very much more likely that somebody will refuse consent at the first stage. However, should it happen then Everwell does try to actively engage with the individual and you (employer) to try to find a solution to allow us to issue a report. Ultimately if an individual withdraws their consent for Everwell to issue a report, we will honor this and cannot issue a report.