PI&DP Freedom of Information

The purpose of the Act is to promote openness, and accountability in the public sector by giving people a right of access to all types of recorded information held by public authorities.

Public Authorities include NHS bodies, government departments, local authorities, schools, colleges and universities, the police and parliament.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOI) gives you the right to find out whether information you require is held by Kettering General Hospital NHS Trust, and if so, to have access to it.

Although the Freedom of Information Act was introduced with the aim of increasing openness and transparency, there are some circumstances when information cannot be disclosed.

Access to information

For legal reasons or to preserve individual confidentiality, there will occasionally be some information that we can't publish or need to make available as an edited version of the original document.

How we manage Freedom of Information and other requests for information.

We are unable to provide copies of medical records under the Freedom of Information Act.  For details of the process for requesting copies of your medical records, read more on the page accessing personal medical records.

For more information, please visit the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) website.

Guide to information

Kettering General Hospital has a legal duty to adopt and maintain a Publication Scheme under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. The purpose of the Act is to promote greater openness by public authorities. 

Kettering General Hospital Foundation Trust routinely publishes information about us, our spending, our priorities, our decisions, policies and procedures, information in lists and registers, and about our services.  We publish this information in accordance with the Model Publication Scheme and in line with the Definition Document for NHS Organisations Definition Document for Health Bodies in England

How to request information that is not included in the Publication Scheme

As an open and transparent organisation, we are committed to routinely publishing as much information as possible: however, if you want information which is not on our website or otherwise available through our guide to information you may ask us for it in accordance with further provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 under the ‘general right of access’ by writing to:

Request for Information Team
Data Security and Protection
Kettering Hospital
Cytringan House
Robinson Way
Kettering
NN16 8PT
E-mail: kgh-tr.foi@nhs.net

Your application must:
•    Be made in writing, including e-mail
•    Please include a name and address for correspondence
•    Describe the information that you are requesting, giving us enough detail about the information to allow us to correctly identify and find it.

Details of how the Trust is following the Code of Practice are available in our IG Policy Procedure Template with Impact Assessment (Add a link here to the policy — not published on the policies and procedures page.)

Confidentiality

You have the right to confidentially under the Data Protection Act 2018, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the common law duty of confidence. We aim to provide you with the highest quality healthcare and to do so we must keep records about you, about your health and the care that we have provided or plan to provide to you.

The Trust is committed to ensuring that patient health medical records and other personal information are kept securely and confidential. We take this responsibility very seriously and all our staff are required to keep that confidence and are under a legal and contracted obligation to maintain confidentiality, and any breach of that duty is a serious disciplinary offence.

For more information about access to personal information and your rights under the Data Protection Act.     

Limits of disclosure – Freedom of Information exemptions

Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will disclose information wherever possible. However, in some cases information cannot be supplied in full or in part if one of the exemptions outlined in the Freedom of Information Act, must be applied.  For example, where in certain limited circumstances, it will be necessary to preserve confidentiality where it is not in the public interest to disclose the information requested.

If possible, we will supply the information requested with the exempt information removed.  In any case where information is refused, the Trust will specify which exemption is being claimed and why.  All requests for information will be carefully considered on their own merits and with close regard to the public interest.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) publishes detailed guidance notes that provide organisations and individuals with all the information they need to know about the Freedom of Information Act on the ICO website, including Freedom of information guidance and resources.

Complaints and review 

If you feel that your request has not been handled well, you do not agree that the information will be exempt, or you disagree with the suggested cost of providing the information, you can request an internal review of the original decision. Details of how to appeal will be provided with any response to your request.

If you are not satisfied with the response to your request for information you may make a formal complaint by writing to:
University Hospitals of Northamptonshire Data Protection Manager
Data Security and Protection Team
Cytringan House
Robinson Way
Kettering
NN16 8PT
Kettering General Hospital
E-mail: kgh-tr.foi@nhs.net please mark the subject header FOI Complaint and include the date the original request for information was made.

The Trust’s target for a substantive response to a complaint is twenty working days. Complainants will be kept informed if any delays appear likely. In exceptional circumstances, a review may take up to forty days.

For more information on how to complain to the Information Commissioner can be found on their website page FOI and EIR complaints. Please note that the Information Commissioner is a regulator, not an ombudsman.  The Information Commissioner will make an assessment as to whether the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 have been complied with.    

Fees and charges

The Freedom of Information Act and the associated fees regulations state that we cannot charge for providing information unless we are allowed to do so (this is called the statutory basis) or charge for the amount of time taken to locate the information unless it takes more than 18 hours. However, we are allowed to charge for disbursements which include things such as copying, reformatting and postage.

We do not charge for information accessed via our website. For information that is provided in hard copy then we will advise if a charge is to be made. 

Assessing the appropriate limit

The Freedom of Information Act provides for public authorities to either charge for or decline requests for information that would cost over what is referred to as the appropriate limit, which is set at £450. This is equivalent to about two and a half days work (or 18 hours at the rate of £25 per hour).

Public authorities are required to estimate whether a request is likely to breach the ‘appropriate limit’ and where it does, to notify the applicant of the estimated costs and where available, the options to reduce those costs as may be required. 

Calculation of fees

The Trust will calculate the fees by estimating the time it will reasonably incur on the following activities:
•    Determining whether the information requested is held
•    Locating the information or documents containing the information
•    Retrieving such information or documents
•    Extracting the information from the document containing it (including editing or redacting information)
The standard hourly rate that all authorities must use to calculate the staff costs of answering requests is £25 per hour.

There will be no fee to pay for requests for information that cost less than £450 or 18 working hours to complete as prescribed in the fees regulations.

The Trust is however, entitled to make a charge to recover the cost of reproduction of the information and postage, which are referred to as disbursements costs and will do so if those costs exceed £5 in total.

If there is a fee to pay, you will be notified in writing through a “Fees Notice”, including the total cost and an explanation of how those costs have been calculated. The 20-day compliance time is suspended and reactivated upon receipt of payment.

The Trust will provide advice and assistance and discuss with the requester how the scope of their request could be narrowed to keep the fees as low as possible.

When the Trust has issued a ‘fees notice’, the applicant has three months to pay. The authority does not have to answer the request until payment has been received (section 9(2) of the Freedom of Information Act) and will consider the request to have been cancelled if payment is not forthcoming within three months after the fees notice is issued.

Requests costing more than the appropriate limit

If a request would cost more than the appropriate limit to answer, the Trust is not obliged to answer it. However, the Trust will provide advice and assistance, so far as it is reasonable to do so, to the person who made the request to see if the question could be refined, or resubmitted in part, to bring it below the appropriate limit.

If after providing advice and assistance (as required under section 16) the request would still cost more than the appropriate limit to answer, the Trust will inform the applicant of this no later than the 20-day limit for answering requests. The Trust has several options:
•    it can decide not to provide the information
•    it can answer and charge a permitted fee calculated in accordance with the Fees Regulations, or
•    it can answer without charging

Aggregating requests

Where the Trust receives several requests from either the same person or different people asking for the same or similar information within a short time of each other, we may consider aggregating these requests to take an overall view of the resources which would have to be committed to answering all the requests.
When can you aggregate requests?
A public authority like the Trust can only aggregate requests in the following circumstances:
•    two or more requests for information have been made to the same public authority
•    they must be either from the same person, or from 'different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign'
•    the requests must relate to the same or similar information
•    they must have been received by the public authority within a space of 60 consecutive working days

Disbursement costs

If a request is estimated to cost less that the prescribed £450 limit, and there is no other basis on which it may be refused or otherwise dealt with, the Trust will answer the request (subject to the limits of disclosure).  The maximum fee that can be charged in these cases is limited to “disbursement costs”, including specified costs of postage, printing and photocopying in:

•    Informing you whether the Trust holds the information
•    Reproducing any document containing the information and
•    Communicating the information to you

An estimate of the level of these “disbursement” costs is indicated in the table of charges.  Please be aware that postage and Packaging (P&P) is also taken into consideration when supplying information requested.  If the Trust has issued a Fees Notice, payment will be required in advance before any work commences on making information available.

If the information requested is to be ‘viewed’ at a location in the Trust, then you should go to the location stated.  Please note that any documents viewed may attract a charge if copies are required.

A charge may be made to cover the cost of providing information in the particular manner (format) requested in the application.   Glossy or other bound paper copies, or in some cases CD Rom’s video or other mediums will attract an additional charge to cover the cost of the format requested.

No charges will be applied for any information accessed via our website.  For any information which is provided in hard copy and where there is no statutory provision for charges our rates will be as shown in the Table of Disbursement Charges.

Once a request is made the applicant will be provided with details of any fees or charges that may be applied to that request. Documents will not be issued until the appropriate fees and charges are paid.  Payment should be by cheque made out to: Kettering General Hospital Foundation Trust with details of the Freedom of Information request the payment applies to, if applicable.

Environmental information regulations 2004

Environmental information is exempt information under Section 39 of the Freedom of Information Act and is dealt with under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004.

Unlike the Freedom of Information, there is no "appropriate limit" in the Regulations and there is no requirement under regulation 12(4)(b) to answer a request that is "manifestly unreasonable". This would apply to requests which would have an unreasonable resource impact on the Trust.

The Trust cannot make a charge for allowing an applicant:
•    access to any public registers or lists of environmental information; or
•    to examine the information (at a place chosen by the public authority)
For all other situations charging is at the discretion of the public authority.
For further information see the Information Commissioner's Guidance: What are the Environmental Information Regulations?   

Re-use of public sector information regulations

The Information on this website is the copyright of the Kettering General Hospital NHS Trust unless indicated otherwise. You may re-use the information on this website free of charge in any format. Re-use includes copying, issuing copies to the public, publishing, broadcasting and translation into other languages. It also covers non-commercial research and study. Re-use is subject to the following conditions

You must:
•    Acknowledge the source of our copyright in cases where you supply the information to others
•    Reproduce the information accurately
•    Not use the information in a misleading way
•    Not use the information for the principal purpose of advertising or promoting a product or service

You may establish links to this website but before doing so you should first contact:
The Head of Communications
Kettering General Hospital NHS Trust
Rothwell Road
Kettering
NN16 8UZ

Email: kgh-tr.Comms@nhs.net 

For more information please visit: Legislation.gov.uk

Legislation in full

The purpose of the Freedom of Information Act is to promote openness, and accountability in the public sector by giving people a right of access to all types of recorded information held by public authorities. Public Authorities include government departments, local authorities, NHS bodies, schools, colleges and universities, the police and parliament. This Trust is a public authority.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOI) gives you the right to find out whether information you require is held by Kettering General Hospital NHS Trust, and if so, to have access to it.

This code of practice, issued under section 45 of the Freedom of Information Act, sets out the practices which public authorities should follow when dealing with requests for information under the Act. It provides clear guidance on providing advice and assistance to applicants, transferring requests to other authorities, consulting third parties, the use of confidentiality clauses in contracts and the provision of internal complaints procedures. The section 45 code of practice was revised and re-issued in November 2004.

This code of practice, issued under section 46 of the Freedom of Information Act, gives guidance on good practice in records management. It applies to all authorities subject to the Act, to the Public Records Act 1958 or to the Public Records Act (Northern Ireland) 1923. It also contains guidance on the review and transfer of public records to an archives office for permanent preservation. The section 46 code of practice was revised and re-issued on 16 July 2009.

Copyright