Introduction

This notice outlines how Healthdirect Australia Ltd will collect, use, protect and share your information when you:

• participate in feedback and survey activities following your interaction with a Healthdirect service, including consumer experience surveys delivered after calls, video calls, chats or digital interactions; or
• register to take part in broader consumer engagement activities, such as community panels, co-design sessions, research or other engagement initiatives.

Feedback and survey activities may follow interactions with a range of services managed by Healthdirect, including 1800MEDICARE and Nurse-On-Call helplines, 1800MEDICARE GP, Medicare Mental Health, My Aged Care, Pregnancy Birth and Baby, and digital tools such as the Symptom Checker.

This notice should be read together with our Privacy Policy, which provides more detailed information about how we handle personal information across our services.

Why we collect your information

Healthdirect collects and uses your information to:

• seek your feedback about the service you received
• measure and monitor consumer and industry partner experience and satisfaction across our services
• identify insights and opportunities to improve our services, processes and the consumer experience
• conduct quality assurance and support training and continuous improvement
• contact and invite you to participate in consumer engagement activities, including community panels, co-design activities, surveys and research
• media, marketing and promotional purposes, with your explicit consent
• better understand your interests and tailor our engagement communications accordingly

How we collect your information

1. Feedback and surveys
   We collect your information in several ways, including when you:
   • respond to a post-interaction survey delivered via SMS, email, phone (Computer Assisted Telephone Interview), web intercept or in-app prompt
   • provide feedback through a digital survey on our websites or applications
   • participate in other feedback activities as they are made available
   • Survey invitations are generated based on your interaction with a healthdirect service. Some contact details (such as your phone number or email address) are provided to our survey platform from your service interaction to facilitate the delivery of the survey invitation.
2. Consumer engagement activities
   • We collect information directly from you when you register to join our consumer engagement activities or provide feedback as part of those activities.
   • On occasion, engagement activities may be recorded. You will be advised of this before your participation. If you do not wish to have your audio or video call recorded, please tell our staff.

What types of information we collect

The information we collect depends on the activity.

The information we collect from feedback and surveys includes:

• contact details used to deliver the survey invitation and to contact you if you consent for further research, training, or marketing purposes (for example, name, phone number or email address)
• your responses to survey questions, including satisfaction ratings and free-text comments
• limited demographic information (for example, age range, postcode)
• provided triage outcomes
• metadata about your survey response (for example, date and time, completion status)

Please do not include personal or sensitive information (such as your name, health details or other identifying information) in free-text survey responses. Feedback collected as part of surveys does not form part of a medical or health record.

Information we collect from consumer engagement activities includes:

• your name
• contact details, such as your email address and phone number
• sociodemographic information, such as your age and sex, dependants, and postcode
• health information about you or your dependants, which may include information on illnesses, symptoms you have experienced, and any disabilities or other health services you are receiving or will receive in the future
• information about your ethnic background, indigenous status and your language preferences
• communication preferences, for example, phone, email, SMS, etc

How we use your information

We use the information you provide to:

• analyse patterns, trends and sentiment across our services
• generate aggregated, de-identified reports and dashboards to inform service improvements
• measure consumer experience using metrics, such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• support internal quality assurance and staff training
• send invitations to participate in consumer engagement activities
• deliver newsletters and communications about Healthdirect's engagement outcomes
• with your consent, identify and follow up on feedback or complaints raised by you.

Participation is voluntary, and your decision will not affect the services available to you.

How we may share your information

We may share your information with:

• Qualtrics (our survey platform provider, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Australia), which processes and stores survey data on our behalf
• Ipsos (our research and CATI service partner), which facilitates telephone-based surveys and provides operational support
• Healthdirect staff involved in consumer experience measurement, reporting and service improvement through aggregated and de-identified reporting dashboards that do not contain personal information.

We require our third-party service providers to handle your information in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles and our contractual obligations.

We may also use de-identified and aggregated data to report to government funders and stakeholders on service quality and consumer experience.

1. Providing information is voluntary
   Participation in surveys and consumer engagement activities is entirely voluntary. You are not required to respond to a survey invitation or register for engagement activities, and choosing not to participate will not affect the services available to you.
   
   Where feasible, you may provide feedback anonymously. For phone-based surveys, you do not need to provide your name or detailed personal particulars.


2. Opting out of surveys
   If you do not wish to receive survey invitations, you can:
   • advise our staff when you next interact with the service
   • use the opt-out link included in any SMS survey invitation — you will no longer receive Voice of Customer surveys, or
   • contact us using the details below.

Opting out of consumer engagement and media or marketing activities

If you wish to opt out of consumer engagement activities, or withdraw your consent from being contacted for media or marketing purposes, you can contact us at consumer.engagement@healthdirect.org.au. You can request to:

• be removed from our consumer engagement database and no longer be contacted about engagement activities, such as panels, co-design sessions or research, or
• withdraw your consent for media or marketing purposes — you will not be contacted for these purposes going forward.

You can opt out of one or both at any time. Where content has already been published with your prior consent (for example, a case study or testimonial), it may not be possible to remove it from all channels — we will discuss this with you at the time.

How we keep your information secure

Healthdirect has an obligation to ensure that the information you provide is appropriately protected from misuse, interference and loss, and from unauthorised access, modification and disclosure.

• Survey data is stored securely within the Qualtrics platform, which is hosted in Australia and accessible only to authorised Healthdirect teams and contracted service providers.
• Consumer engagement data is stored securely in a central database that can only be accessed by limited Healthdirect teams. We will continue to store your information unless you tell us that you no longer wish to be considered for further invitations to participate.

Related service collection notices and policies

Surveys are linked to your interaction with a Healthdirect service. The collection notice for the service you used explains how your personal and health information was collected, used and disclosed during that interaction. Please refer to the relevant notice below:

Further information

Our Privacy Policy for members of the public explains in more detail how we process personal information, including how you can access or correct information we hold about you and how to contact us.