The Freedom of Information (FOI) Act 2000 gives you a general right of access to recorded information held by public authorities.
The Act is to make public sector bodies more open and accountable. It also helps you to understand how we carry out our duties, why we make the decisions we do and how we spend public money.
The Act gives you the right to request information held by us, unless there are good reasons not to do so.
Making an FOI request
Please review the information in our Publication Scheme to see if any of the information you are requesting is already published.
If you would like to make a request for information that is not contained within the publication scheme, you can contact us via e-mail using the Trusts FOI mailbox bchft.foi@nhs.net
Please include your email address and describe in as much detail as you can the information that you require.
To ensure the security of our systems and protect personal information, we will not access or click on any digital forms. Additionally, we will not provide personal details, such as the names and email addresses of our staff.
Please limit the number of links in your emails, as these may be blocked by our system.
We will not provide you with details of our information systems that may compromise our patients’ or staff’s information.
What happens next?
We will acknowledge your request by post or e-mail as soon as possible.
In order for us to ensure the information is valid and appropriate exceptions applied where needed, we will not complete your online forms, we will reply in writing to a valid email address.
There may be times when we need to contact you because it is not clear what information you require.
We will provide you with the information that you have requested within 20 working days, however there may be times when we need to consider if the information you are asking for is exempt from disclosure.
This can, on a very rare occasion, take a little more time, so we will ask you if this is acceptable.
If some or all of the information that you have requested is exempt we will let you know why it is not available. .
Most of the information that we provide is free of charge, however if there is a charge we will let you know as soon as possible and you will told how much this will cost.
Details of how to pay the fee will be given to you at the time.
Sometimes the information that you are requesting may exceed what is known as “the appropriate limit”.
This means that we may have to tell you that we cannot provide the information unless you pay the fee.
You could however think of modifying your request to bring the cost down and we will try and help you to do that.
If you are unhappy with how we have dealt with your request, you can ask for us to review this. We will provide details of this in our reply to you, or you can contact:
Freedom of Information Team
Bridgewater Headquarters
Europa Point, Europa Boulevard
Warrington
Cheshire
WA5 7TY
Email: Bchft.foi@nhs.net
Bridgewater Patient Privacy Notice
Read our full Patient Privacy Notice.
Children’s Privacy Notice
Read our full Children’s Privacy Notice.