Legal notices & privacy statement

Important health notice and disclaimer

The Dr Foster site is not a provider of primary or secondary health care. Any opinions stated and information given are not intended to replace the advice of a recognised health care professional. If you need health care advice you should consult a suitably qualified and experienced healthcare professional such as your doctor. We do not warrant that any health care provider or products will meet your requirements.

Given the nature and sources of our information we are not able to guarantee that it is complete, accurate or up to date.

You must always seek the advice of a healthcare professional. The material on this website is intended to provided you with background information only.

In particular, you must not assume that conditions or symptoms discussed on this web site match yours. You must consult a doctor.

We exclude and hereby disclaim all express and implied warranties or conditions unless they are clearly stated on this site as being contractually binding on us and so far as such exclusion is or disclaimer is permitted by law.

This disclaimer does not affect your statutory rights.

Intellectual Property Rights & Permitted Use of this Website

This website is the property and the intellectual property of Dr Foster Research Limited. Except where otherwise identified the programming of this site, and the images and the material presented on it are our copyright, and you are not permitted to copy any part of it for commercial use or distribution without our express prior written permission. The various guides on our website constitute databases and are further protected by the Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament which prohibits the temporary or permanent reproduction of our databases by any means and in any form, in whole or in part without our prior consent. If any of the material belonging to third parties is subject to additional restrictions then you must abide by those restrictions too.

The only permitted use of this website is by individual persons for their own personal non-commercial use, for instance, looking up the doctors who might treat them or the hospitals they might visit. No commercial or academic use is permitted whatsoever, and neither is the downloading, copying or distribution of substantial parts of the website for any purpose at all. Should you wish to use the material on this site for any commercial, marketing, research or similar purposes, then please contact us to discuss your requirements.

We monitor use of this website using a variety of methods. Dr Foster values its intellectual property very highly. We will take all necessary steps to protect our intellectual property and any unauthorised use of the material on our website will result in legal proceedings against you.

Trademarks

Dr Foster and the Dr Foster logo are trademarks of Dr Foster Limited. The Dr Foster Health logo is a trademark of Dr Foster Research Limited. You may not use our trademarks without prior written permission from us.

drfosterhealth.co.uk™ is a trademark URL of Dr Foster Research Ltd. Dr Foster Research Ltd is the owner of the trademark appearing on or used in relation to Dr Foster Health and Medical Guides and the associated goodwill. Unless Dr Foster Research expressly agrees, you have no right or licence to use this trade mark URL.

Jurisdiction

This site is maintained and operated from England. Your use of this website is conditional upon you agreeing to be bound by English Law. If a dispute arises in connection with your use of this web site, then that dispute shall be determined exclusively in the Courts in England.

Complaints

If you have a complaint about the content of this site please refer to the Ethics Committee section.

Comments

If you have any comments on how this site could be improved or wish to contact us about some other matter concerning Dr Foster Limited please refer to the contact us section.

Privacy statement

Dr Foster is registered with the United Kingdom Data Protection Registrar and is committed to dealing with personal data in the spirit of the Data Protection Act 1998 ("the Act").

Dr Foster holds a current Data Protection registration which may be inspected at The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) website. The registration number is Z9535101.

Dr Foster Ethics Committee Limited also holds a Data Protection registration. The registration number is Z1150883

How we may obtain personal information

We may collect personal data concerning you and gather information connected with your use of this site in a number of ways. This may arise by virtue of you visiting this site (using the standard data generated by our website server logs), by you participating in site surveys, or by you contacting us.

Access to parts of this website and use of certain facilities will require you to properly identify yourself to us and you must abide by our 'acceptable use' policy.

Links to and from other sites

This site may only be linked from third party sites with prior written consent. Deep linking to this site without written permission is expressly prohibited.

We have no control over and do not vet the content policy or procedures of third party sites and do not accept liability or responsibility for the same even if there is a hypertext link on this site to another site. Links from or to a third party site does not indicate our endorsement of that third party site or any of the goods or services offered by it. If you have a complaint regarding such a link on this site please either use the Contact us section or the Ethics Committee section.

Use of information that does not identify you

We may use personal data for the provision of demographic information of an aggregated and collective nature for our own analysis of commercial trends, site usage and other similar research and statistics. We may share this with third parties in an anonymous format that does not allow you to be identified.