Regulating doctors, ensuring good medical practice

Recordings for which separate consent is not required

  1. 10. Consent to make the recordings listed below will be implicit in the consent given to the investigation or treatment, and does not need to be obtained separately.
  • Images of internal organs or structures
  • Images of pathology slides
  • Laparoscopic and endoscopic images
  • Recordings of organ functions
  • Ultrasound images
  • X-rays
  1. 11. When seeking consent to treatment or any other procedure6 that involves making one of the recordings listed in paragraph 10, you should, where practicable, explain that such a recording will be made and could be used in anonymised form for secondary purposes, including in the public domain.
  2. 12. You may disclose or use any of the recordings listed in paragraph 10 for secondary purposes without seeking consent provided that, before use, the recordings are anonymised for example, by the removal or coding of any identifying marks such as writing in the margins of an X-ray (see paragraph 17). Further advice on anonymising information is available from the Information Commissioner’s Office.7

Footnotes

6See part 2 of Consent: patients and doctors making decisions together for advice on making decisions about investigations and treatment, including sharing information with patients.

7Section C of the publication Data Protection Technical Guidance – Determining what is personal data (pdf) (Information Commissioner’s Office, 2007) deals with the anonymisation of information.