How your information is handled

When you apply to the weight management programme you give Natural Aesthetics your name, your contact details, your date of birth, your height and weight, the medicines you take, and your answers to a short list of medical questions.

Why we ask

A doctor reads your answers to decide whether the programme is safe for you. That is the only reason they are collected, and they are not used for anything else.

Who sees them

The doctors and reception staff of this practice, and nobody else. Every time a member of staff opens your answers, that is recorded — who, and when. Your answers are not sold, not shared with an insurer or a medical scheme, and not sent to anybody outside the practice.

Paying by debit order

If you go onto the programme and choose to pay monthly, we hold your name, your telephone number, the monthly fee, and a reference number. We do not hold your card number or your bank account number, and no money passes through this system: you confirm the instruction at your own bank, your bank keeps it, and your bank checks every collection against it. If the amount, the date or the collector does not match what you agreed, your bank stops it.

The line on your statement is a monthly programme fee. It is for the consultation, the scan, the plan, the weekly review and the doctor’s time — never for a medicine, and never priced by the dose. If a month passes in which the practice has not seen you, the fee for that month is not taken, and there will be a record saying so.

If you write to us on WhatsApp

Outside our opening hours you get one automatic reply, written in advance by a person. Your telephone number, your message and that reply are kept, so that somebody at the practice can telephone you back. Nothing is sent to anybody outside the practice, and no computer writes its own words to you.

Please do not send medical details on WhatsApp. A chat window is not built to hold what you weigh, what you take or what is wrong with you. The application form is: it asks your permission first, and it records who read it. If you ask us not to contact you again, we stop.

How long they are kept

Health information is kept as long as the law requires a clinical record to be kept. If the programme is not right for you, your application is closed rather than deleted, so there is a record that you were told and why.

Your rights

Under the Protection of Personal Information Act you may ask what we hold about you, ask for a mistake to be corrected, and object to how it is used. Telephone the practice on +27 21 433 0967.

Your answers are special personal information under section 26 of the Act. They are stored encrypted, access is restricted by role, and every read is written to an audit record.