Privacy policy

PharmOSy is software for UK community pharmacies, operated by To confirm: registered company name and number. You can reach us at contact@pharmosy.co.uk.

Our ICO registration number is To confirm.

This is the single most important thing on the page, so it is first.

• For visitors to this website - someone reading these pages or filling in the contact form - we are the data controller. We decide what is collected and why.
• For patient records inside the platform we are the data processor. The pharmacy is the controller. It is their patient, their clinical record and their decision. We hold and process it on their instruction, under a written agreement with them.

In practice: if you are a patient and you want your record changed or deleted, ask your pharmacy. They can do it, and we will support them doing it. We will not act on a patient record without the pharmacy that owns it.

• Contact form. Your name, email address, pharmacy name if you give one, and your message. We use it to reply to you and for nothing else. We do not add you to a mailing list on the strength of a contact form.
• Spam protection. The contact form runs Google reCAPTCHA, which assesses whether the submission is automated. Google receives technical signals about that request under its own privacy policy.
• Analytics, only if you accept it. On the public pages of this website, Google Analytics counts visits and which pages are read, once you choose Accept on the cookie banner. Google handles that under its own privacy policy. It never runs inside the pharmacy platform or on a pharmacy's patient pages. See the cookie policy.
• Server logs. Ordinary web server records: the page requested, the time, the browser, and an IP address. They exist for security and for diagnosing faults.

We do not sell anything to anyone, and we do not share enquiry details with third parties for marketing.

Once a pharmacy is using PharmOSy, the platform holds what running those services requires:

• Patient contact details and the demographics the service specification asks for.
• Clinical consultation records, including the answers to the protocol questions, exclusions checked and the outcome recorded.
• Referrals (SBARs) drafted from those consultations, and whether the practice has replied.
• Repeat prescription orders and their status.
• Appointments and bookings.
• Staff accounts, and a record of which member of staff did what.

Clinical records are special category data under UK GDPR. They are held on the lawful bases the pharmacy relies on to deliver the service - usually the provision of health care under Article 9(2)(h) - and they are handled accordingly.

Every pharmacy has its own separate database. This is not a shared table with a pharmacy column on it. The separation is structural. One pharmacy cannot query another's patients, because the connection it holds does not reach them.

Data is held on servers in the United Kingdom To confirm: hosting provider and region and is encrypted in transit. It is not transferred outside the UK or EEA.

• The pharmacy's own team, according to the role their account has. An account is created by the pharmacy, and the pharmacy removes it when someone leaves.
• The GP practice named on a referral, and only what that referral contains. SBARs travel NHS Mail to NHS Mail from the pharmacy's own nhs.net account. Until that account is configured, the send route is hidden entirely and referrals are printed instead - we do not fall back to ordinary email for clinical correspondence.
• Us, only where it is necessary to run or fix the service, and only with the pharmacy's knowledge. We do not browse patient records.

• Contact enquiries: kept while we are dealing with them and for up to 24 months afterwards, then deleted.
• Server logs: kept for up to 12 months.
• Patient and clinical records: the retention period is the pharmacy's decision, set by the NHS records management code of practice and their own policy. We hold them for as long as the pharmacy instructs, and we delete them when the pharmacy instructs.

A pharmacy can have a full export of its database whenever it asks. Not a support ticket, not a fee, not a negotiation at renewal. We would rather compete on the software than on how hard it is to leave.

Individual rights under UK GDPR - access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection - apply. For a patient record, exercise them through the pharmacy, which holds the relationship and the clinical judgement. For anything you sent us through this website, email us directly and we will handle it within one month.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a request, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office. We would rather you told us first, but that is your right and we will not stand in the way of it.

• Separate database per pharmacy, so a fault in one cannot expose another.
• Role-based access, so a member of staff sees what their role needs and not the rest.
• Passwords stored hashed, never in readable form. Nobody here can tell you what your password is, including us.
• Encrypted in transit (HTTPS) across the whole platform.

No system is perfect. If we ever have a breach that is likely to result in a risk to people's rights, we will tell the ICO within 72 hours and tell the affected pharmacies without delay - and we will tell them what actually happened, not a sanitised version of it.

When this changes we update the date at the top. For a change that materially affects how patient data is handled, we tell the pharmacies directly rather than relying on anyone re-reading a web page.