Staff will soon be receiving an email notification advising them of their enrolment in an e-learn module on privacy in practice.

Why is privacy important?
Our students, staff, patients, research participants and others trust us with their personal and health information. Trust, like reputation, is one of those things that can take weeks, months, even years to build up, and be destroyed in a bad or even accidental move very quickly.

We deal with significant amounts of information on a day-to-day basis and it is important we are aware of our responsibilities and ensure we do our best to protect the information we have been given.

What is the University doing to ensure we maintain trust?
Specific tools have been developed to assist you in understanding your responsibilities:

• Privacy Management Plan (PDF, 524KB)
• Privacy Policy
• Privacy wiki
• Privacy e-learn (found in your online training system dashboard)
• Face-to-face training

What do I need to do?
There are ten steps that should be done by every staff member:

1. Familiarise yourself with internal privacy policies, processes and procedures by completing the mandatory e-learn and enrolling in face-to-face training.
2. Know who to escalate your privacy queries to.
3. Consider privacy during project planning (e.g. consider privacy implications upfront and consult early if a project may require we share a significant amount of personal information).
4. Only collect the personal information you need – if you don’t need it don’t ask for it.
5. Use and disclosure — think about it, would the individual reasonably expect that we would use or share their information in that way, and have they been told this was our intention?
6. Overseas disclosure — always consult if you think a project may involve sending personal information overseas or interstate.
7. Take even more care when handling sensitive information such health information or religious beliefs.
8. Access personal information on a need-to-know basis – there is a lot of information held by the University, don’t go probing into your friend’s records just because you can.
9. Keep personal information secure.
10. Familiarise yourself with the data breach response plan – if in doubt contact the Privacy Officer (privacyofficer@mq.edu.au).

All staff will be enrolled in the new privacy e-learn and are requested to complete the training module by 30 June. For face-to-face training, you can enrol in a session by logging into the online training system and searching ‘privacy’ in the ‘Course catalogue’ section.