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Right to Privacy| SLOVENIA
| GENERAL OVERVIEW | BIOMEDICINE CONVENTION | EU MEMBER STATES | TYPES OF PATIENT RIGHTS LEGISLATION |
| 1. The patient has a right to have his personal data kept confidential, which includes data about visits to the doctor and other details of his treatment. Medical workers must handle a patient's personal and other data in line with the principle of confidentiality and with respecting the regulations dealing with personal data. 2. Medical professionals and all other staff who handle such data are bound to protect as the professional secrecy everything they find out as part of their jobs about patients. This applies foremost for information on the patient's state of health, his personal, family and social circumstances as well as information related to treatment and monitoring of disease or injury. 3. The right to privacy enjoys constitutional protection in the Slovenian legal system. The Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia guarantees the inviolability of the physical and mental integrity of every person, his/her privacy and rights of personality. 4. The processing of health-related data is governed by the Health Care Databases Act. This act determines the collection of data from health care as well as the collection, processing and forwarding of data that is administered, used and exchanged during tasks determined by law by different entities that perform health care activities. The gathering, processing and forwarding of data from this database is governed by the Personal Data Protection Act. This act lays down the rights, obligations, principles and measures that are used to prevent unconstitutional, illegal and unjustified encroachments into an individual’s privacy and dignity during the processing of data. 5. The Personal Data Protection Act regulates the duty of the administrator of personal data to allow the individual the access to the catalogue of the collection of personal data and to confirm whether this data related to him are processed or not. The Act expressly permits not only the insight into the personal data but also the transcription and copying of data. The act moreover allows the individual to demand to be given a printout of personal data that are included in the database and refer to the patient. 6. The Personal Data Protection Act determines that the individual can demand that the administrator of personal data – i.e. the health care institution – amends, corrects, blocks access to or deletes personal data, referring to an individual, for which the individual can prove that they are incomplete, incorrect, out of date or that they were collected or processed in violation of law. |