Privacy

The Consumer Experience Interviews program (the ‘Program’), is led by IQVIA and will be administered and conducted in partnership with Access Care Network Australia (ACNA) and HealthConsult. The Australian Government Department of Health has engaged the IQVIA Consortium (‘IQVIA’), an independent third-party, to administer the Program on behalf of the Department of Health.

The IQVIA Consortium take your privacy seriously and are bound by the Australian Privacy Principles contained within the Privacy Act 1988 (as amended from time to time).

During the program, the Department of Health will provide the IQVIA Consortium with de-identified information on residential aged care residents – bed numbers, occupied bed numbers, resident year of birth, sex, and duration of residency. Additional data may be requested from facilities about residents, such as room number (or other identifier), assessed cognitive impairment, whether an interpreter is required (and what language they require), if they belong to a special needs groups and if so, which one, whether resident is at end of life.

All anonymised information will be held on a database on a secure server within Australia (maintained by IQVIA, the Program administrator). Your identity will not be revealed in any reviews and reports which may be published from this study, and any information collected from you will remain confidential as required by law, except as otherwise described below.

For residents

Information provided by residents during interviews will be saved in a way that is not linked to their name or other identifying information. Residents cannot be identified by their residential aged care facility or the Department of Health from any information they provide.

All interview answers from people living at a given residential aged care service will be grouped together and summarised in a report to give an overall ‘consumer experience’ score for that facility.

This score will become part of the star rating for each residential aged care service. A person’s individual answers will not be shared with anyone working at the same residential aged care service.

Information collected during the program is strictly confidential and stored securely. The identity of residents will not be revealed in any reviews and reports which may be published from the rogram, and any information collected from residents will remain confidential as required by law.

For facilities

Randomised resident interview lists are compiled before visiting each site based on information provided by the Department of Health. Facilities will not be provided with a list of residents to be interviewed.

Aggregated, de-identified information from the interviews conducted at a given facility will be provided to each facility in a Consumer Experience Report. The reports include information as provided by residents, on the quality of care and services in residential aged care facilities. This document will be available to the general public on the My Aged care website.

Security

IQVIA provide reasonable physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect personal information we work with and maintain. Please be aware, although we try to protect the information we work with and maintain, no security system can prevent all potential security breaches.

Further details

For more information about IQVIA’s privacy policy and further details on how your personal information will be collected, used and stored, please click here.

Should you wish to access or correct your personal information, request its deletion or stop it from being processed, kindly contact the IQVIA Privacy Officer by contacting The Privacy Officer, IQVIA Solutions Australia, Level 8, 201 Pacific Highway, St Leonards, NSW 2065.

For information about ACNA’s privacy, please click here.

For information about HealthConsult’s privacy, please click here.