NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) fully respects your right to privacy when using our website. On this page you will find details of our privacy practices in connection with this website and what we do to maintain your right to privacy.
Collection of personal information on this website
NHS National Services Scotland does not collect any personal data about you on this website, apart from information that you volunteer, either by emailing us or by submitting the online forms.
Use of personal information collected via this website
Any information, which you provide via this website is not made available to any third parties. Any information provided is used by NSS solely for the purpose of processing your information request.
Collection and use of technical information
Technical details in connection with visits to this website are logged, collected and used by our website host, Whitespace, as described below:
User tracking
NSS will make no attempt to identify individual users. You should be aware, however, that access to web pages will generally create log file entries in the systems of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or network services provider. These entities may identify the client computer equipment used to access a page. Such monitoring would be done by the provider of network services and is outwith the responsibility or control of NSS.
Use of cookies
A cookie is a small data file that certain websites write to your hard drive when you visit them. This site uses different types of cookie.
We use Google Analytics, a popular web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. Google Analytics uses cookies to help us to analyse how users use the site.
The information generated by the cookie about your use of our website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of our website, compiling reports on website activity and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage. Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google's behalf. Google undertakes not to associate your IP address with any other data held by Google.
If you have Adobe Flash installed on your computer (you can check if Flash installed here) and you use video players, Google Analytics will try to store some additional data on your computer. This data is known as a Local Shared Object or Flash cookie. This helps us to analyse the popularity of our media files. We can count the total number of times each file is played, how many people watch videos right to the end and how many people give up half way through. Adobe's website offers tools to control Flash cookies on your computer.
If you want to delete any cookies that are already on your computer, please refer to the instructions for your file management software to locate the file or directory that stores cookies. You can access them through some types of browser. Search in your cookie folders for 'nhsnss' to find our cookie and the Google Analytics cookie if you wish to delete them.
More information about cookies, including how to block them or delete them, can be found at AboutCookies.org.
Visitors can use this website with no loss of functionality if cookies are disabled from the web browser.
Cookies used by this website
This list shows all cookies used by the Health Facilities Scotland website, and what each is used for.
__utmb (Expiry: 30 minutes)
Google Analytics cookie. This stores the domain name (hash code) of site, pages viewed this session, current time.
__utmc (Expiry: At end of session)
Google Analytics cookie. This stores the domain name (hash code) of site.
__utma (Expiry: 2 years)
Google Analytics cookie. This stores the domain name (hash code) of site, a unique visitor id (randomly generated number), time of first visit, time of previous visit, current time, number of sessions since first visit.
__utmz (Expiry: 6 months)
Google Analytics cookie. This stores the domain name (hash code) of site, time when cookie last set, total number of visitor sessions, number of different channels or sources through which this site was reached, source of the last cookie update, search hit tag identifier (or just 'organic' if reached via normal search hit), search medium, keyword phrase used to find site.
PREF (Expiry: 2 years)
Saves the user's Google identifier, time of first receiving this cookie, last time when preferences were set, checksum for data integrity. This third-party cookie is placed by Google to track a user's preferences from one Google site to another.
SPROCKET_SESSION (Expiry: At end of session)
Appears to be used by the Sprocket Content Management System to store a general session id. Information is set on all pages of the HFS website.
SPROCKET_SESSION_DATA (Expiry: At end of session)
An additional session cookie used by the Sprocket CMS to store information about online publication requests from the HFS site.
Log files
Log files are maintained and analysed of all requests for files on NSS servers. Aggregated analyses of these log files are used to monitor website usage. These analyses are used to allow us to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of our websites All log file information collected by NSS is kept secure and is not provided to any third parties.
Enquiries
Privacy and data protection enquiries relating to this website may be made in writing to:
NSS Data Protection Advisor
NHS National Services Scotland
Gyle Square
1 South Gyle Crescent
Edinburgh
EH12 9EB
NSS.dataprotection@nhs.net