How is data collected?
Trained Data Registration Officers (DROs) who are members of the NSRF team, visit hospitals across Ireland and review the hospital records of anyone who visited the Emergency Departments.
The reason for this is to count and monitor, self-harm presentations to Emergency Departments each year.
When a DRO comes across a case of self-harm among the hospital records, further relevant information is collected from those patients’ hospital records.
What data are collected?
- The type of self-harm
- How patients arrived at the hospital
- Date and time of arrival
- Type of treatment received
The patient’s name, date of birth and address are also collected, but they are not stored by the Registry as they are identifiable information.
The patient’s name, date of birth and address are only used by the DRO to create a unique code for the patient, and to identify the general area in which they live. This is to ensure that the same person is not counted twice, and to count and monitor cases of self-harm based on the county the person lives in.
What happens once the data is collected?
Once the DRO has collected the relevant data from the hospital records, they submit a file electronically to the Registry Team.
Patient identifiers (name, date of birth, address) are not submitted, just the unique code that was created for them.
Is my data in the Registry?
If you have attended a hospital Emergency Department with injuries related to self-harm, your data may have been collected and recorded by the Registry.
If it is noted that a patient does not wish for their data to be collected from their hospital record, then the patient’s wish will be respected, and their data will not be recorded in the Registry.
Data protection rights
Anyone can contact the Registry to check if their data has been recorded.
The person will need to provide sufficient details to allow us to identify their data record.
If someone’s data has been recorded, they have the right to request their data and to withdraw their data from the Registry.
If someone requests their data, their data will be provided by a member of the Registry team.
If someone requests to have their data withdrawn, their data record will be removed from the Registry masterfiles.
Any data recorded or submitted by the Data Registration Officers will be electronically and/ or physically shredded. Confirmation of this will be sent to the person who made the request.
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