National Audit for Small Animal Neutering

• Country of practice (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland)
• Practice name (for a certificate to be sent to the practice. This certificate can be used for the RCVS Practice Standards Scheme- to show you are taking part in a national audit for benchmarking purposes)
• Date of surgery
• Type of surgery (to choose from):
  • Cat castrate.
  • Cat spay.
  • Dog castrate.
  • Bitch spay.
  • Laparoscopic bitch spay.
  • Rabbit castrate.
  • Rabbit spay.
• Complication/follow-up (to choose from):
  • Lost to follow up.
  • No abnormality.
  • Abnormal – no treatment required.
  • Abnormal – medication required.
  • Abnormal – surgery required.
  • Death of animal.

Other data is optional to provide, and includes:

• Breed
• Weight
• Type of procedure (flank, midline, open, closed, open-closed)

No personal data is collected for the NASAN. The data submitted does not fall under the remit of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

When you send your data to the NASAN, your email and practice name will be used to send back your participation certificate. This data is not stored. By sending us the data, and providing an email address, you give us permission to use your email address and practice name in this way.

How we define personal information (personal data)

'Personal data' means information which relates to a living person who can be identified from that data (a ‘data subject’) on its own, or when taken together with other data which is likely to come into our possession. This may be for example: a name, an address, phone number, email address or even an IP address. It does not include anonymised data.

This policy applies to all personal data whether it is stored electronically, on paper or on other materials. We will comply with the lawful basis processing requirements under Article 6 of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

We collect your data when you give it to us directly. This is by sending us your completed NASAN spreadsheet, either by email, or by the submission form.

We place the highest importance on the securing of your data. We employ industry leading approaches to secure your digital (files and database entries) data. For cyber security reasons we do not publicly disclose the exact nature of the methods/techniques we use to secure your data.

We make every effort to protect its databases against loss, theft, unauthorised access, disclosure, copying, unauthorised use or modification. 

We only allow those of our employees who require access to such information in order to fulfil their duties to have such access.
For security purposes we use software programs to monitor traffic to identify unauthorised attempts to upload or change personal data, to screen our system for viruses, or otherwise cause damage to our database.

In addition to a broad range of cyber security provisions across all our systems and information stores, certain sections of our web sites and web applications encrypt your data in transit using SSL and comparable encryption standards.

However, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be totally secure. As a result, whilst we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information which you send to us, and so you do so at your own risk.

When we outsource any processes, we require the third party supplier to have appropriate security measures in place and be compliant with the GDPR principles. We require all third parties to respect the privacy of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law.

Third-party service providers should process your data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions and should not use your data for their own purposes. They will also be contractually bound by non-disclosure agreements to ensure the security of your data.

If any of your data is to be transferred to another country, we will ensure that suitable safeguards are in place before personal data is shared. We will not transfer, process or store your data anywhere that is outside of the European Economic Area, unless we have a contractual agreement in place that is of an equivalent standard to GDPR.

What do we do with your data?

• All submitted data is pseudo-anonymised and analysed on an annual basis. This report is made publicly available to allow practices to compare their complication rates against the national benchmark.
• All submitted data is kept in a secure, password protected location.
• Your practice name will be used to generate a certificate for participation. This certificate can be used as evidence if you are taking part with the RCVS Practice Standards Scheme, and will be sent to the email address you supply when you submit the data. 

What don’t we do with your data?

• We won’t share your data in any other way than previously described.
• We won’t run reports or publish data with any practice details in.
• We will not disclose your data to third parties. 

How long is your data kept for?

The data is kept indefinitely as part of a national benchmark.