Any information appearing on www.nhslothian.scot.nhs.uk is issued as general information and does not constitute a warranty by any health organisation. No responsibility can be accepted by NHS Lothian or any other health organisation for action or inaction as a result of information contained on the NHS Lothian website. Readers should take specific advice in respect of specific situations.
The use and access of pages of the NHS Lothian website is subject to the terms and conditions set out below and by the disclaimer above. By using or accessing this website, you agree to be bound by these terms and conditions.
Copyright
Content on this website is copyright © of NHS Lothian unless otherwise stated. Where NHS Lothian copyright applies, visitors can download material for private research, study or in-house use only. Visitors must not copy, distribute, or publish any material from this website. Any other use of NHS Lothian copyright material requires written permission.
Links to other Websites
The provision on the NHS Lothian website of a link to another website does not constitute any authorisation to access material held at that location. Links to sites are provided for informational purposes only and no responsibility is accepted for the quality of resources to be found on such websites. The contents and material made available on linked sites are completely outwith our control and as such no liability is accepted for any damages resulting from accessing or failing to access these sites. No endorsement is expressed or implied by the presence of a link on the NHS Lothian website. The contents of a linked-to website may change without our knowledge and as a result, links may break or may terminate on pages which were not the original targets of a link. No responsibility or liability for the privacy of personal information is accepted for linked to websites, as these are beyond our control.
Warranties
The resources contained on the NHS Lothian website, including all files that are authorised for public and password-protected download or access, are provided on an "as is" basis and without any warranties. Although files are virus checked these cannot guarantee that files are free from computer viruses and no warranty is given that files downloaded or accessed from the NHS Lothian website are free of computer viruses. No warranties are made as to fitness for purpose, quality or completeness of information. NHS Lothian excludes any liability for any errors in or omissions in information provided on or linked to from this website.
Reliability of information
NHS Lothian uses its best efforts to ensure the accuracy and reliability of information on the NHS Lothian website in accordance with the policies defined for NHS Lothian. However, no guarantees are made that the information contained on NHS Lothian or associated, or linked to websites is accurate, complete and current at any given time. Information presented on the NHS Lothian website or associated sites may be changed at any time. The resources made available on the NHS Lothian website are intended to assist users in their use of the National Health Service and are for information only. The NHS Lothian website is not intended in any way to replace the advice of your doctor. Nothing on this website is intended to constitute advice to you. Specific advice should be sought in specific situations from a properly qualified health worker. Content on the NHS Lothian website is governed by a number of policies and guidelines. Users of the NHS Lothian website agree to inform NHS Lothian if they should come across any material contained which they consider to be potentially in breach of any relevant legislation in order for the appropriate remedial action to be taken.
Availability of the NHS Lothian website
Although the NHS Lothian website has been tested and should work correctly under normal circumstances, there are many factors both within and outside of the control of NHS Lothian which may prevent the website from being available to users of the world-wide-web. No responsibility is accepted by NHS Lothian for any losses that may arise from an inability to access resources on this site. Where a user finds a specific error in the coding of a web page, or where he/she considers a page to be in breach of accessibility, it is a condition of use of this site that the NHS Lothian web team be notified in order that appropriate action may be taken.
Governing laws
The terms and conditions of use of the NHS Lothian website shall be governed by the laws of Scotland.
Privacy and Data Protection Policy
User Anonymity & Personal Information on the NHS Lothian Website
Log files are maintained and analysed of all requests for files on the NHS Lothian servers. Aggregated analyses of these log files are used to monitor website usage. These analyses are made available to NHS Lothian participating organisations to allow them to measure, for example, overall popularity of the site and typical user paths through the site.
In combination with other information which is not collected by NHS Lothian but which may be collected by suppliers of network services, it may in certain situations be possible to identify an individual user's use of the NHS Lothian website. NHS Lothian does not collect the additional information required and will make no attempt to track or identify individual users, except where explicit consent for this is given or where there is a reasonable suspicion that unauthorised access to systems is being attempted. In the case of all users, NHS Lothian reserves the right to attempt to identify and track any individual who is reasonably suspected of trying to gain unauthorised access to computer systems or resources operating as part of the NHS Lothian service. As a condition of use of this site, all users must give permission for NHS Lothian to use its access logs to attempt to track users who are reasonably suspected of gaining or attempting to gain unauthorised access.
All log file information collected by NHS Lothian is kept secure and no access to raw log files is given to any third party.
In certain cases, a NHS Lothian participating website may implement a registration scheme which will allow usage to be tracked. NHS Lothian policies do not permit this to be done except in cases where users have given informed consent for this to be done, and offending sites will be removed should NHS Lothian become aware of any breaches of this policy. NHS Lothian will endeavour to ensure that participating organisations have proper data-protection procedures in place in respect of the information they make available through their websites.
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 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 nhslothian.scot.nhs.uk 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 NHS Lothian website, and what each is used for.
Cookie Name | Purpose | Expiry |
__utmb | Google Analytics cookie. This stores the domain name (hash code) of site, pages viewed this session, current time. | 30 minutes |
__utmc | Google Analytics cookie. This stores the domain name (hash code) of site. | At end of session |
__utma | 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. | 2 years |
__utmz | 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. | 6 months |
NHS Lothian does not store any information that would on its own allow us to identify individual users of this service without their permission. Any cookies that may be used by NHS Lothian are used either solely on a per session basis or to maintain user preferences. Cookies are not shared with any third parties.
User tracking
Except as stated already, NHS Lothian will make no attempt to identify individual users. You should be aware, however, that access to web pages will generally create log entries in the systems of your ISP or network services provider. These entities may be in a position to 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 NHS Lothian