De-identifying a crisis record is the removal of personal identifiers from notes taken during an acute event. The Data Protection Act 2018 and the NHS Code of Confidentiality govern these records. anonym.plus does the work on your machine, with nothing sent away. Where the call led to someone being taken to a place of safety under s.136 of the Mental Health Act 1983, that record sits alongside DPA 2018 and the NHS Code — s.136 governs the police power to act, not what happens to the paperwork afterwards, which both still protect.
When this applies
A Crisis Resolution and Home Treatment Team (CRHT) log records a call that led to an assessment at a Section 136 place of safety, naming the caller, a friend, and the receiving hospital. You want to review the response without exposing who was involved.
How anonym.plus handles it
- Open the log in anonym.plus on your own device.
- Local OCR lifts text from any scanned form.
- It flags caller and bystander names, times, and places.
- Review each flag and keep the response detail.
- Replace each value with a label, or remove it.
- Save the clean file. The source stays local.
What you need to provide
- The record (PDF, DOCX, TXT, or scan).
- An operator: Replace, Redact, or Mask.
- Optional: a key map for re-linking.
Patient data entity types detected
| Category | anonym.plus entity type | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Caller | PERSON | Priya Shah → [CALLER_1] |
| Bystander | PERSON | friend Joel → [FAMILY_1] |
| Time stamp | DATE_TIME | Call 02:14 08/03/2026 → [DATE] |
| Hospital | ORGANIZATION | Royal Infirmary → [FACILITY] |
| Phone | PHONE_NUMBER | +44 7700 900188 → [PHONE] |
| Address | LOCATION | 7 Cedar Court → [ADDRESS] |
Compliance achieved
- Removes personal identifiers under DPA 2018 & NHS Code of Confidentiality.
- A record involving a Mental Health Act 1983 s.136 place-of-safety response still needs its identifiers removed before any wider review, the same as any other clinical record.
- Local only, so no cloud processor contract is needed.
- Logs are protected with AES-256-GCM.
- Also meets UK GDPR Art. 9 for special-category health records.
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Limitations & cautions
A crisis log can hold rare, vivid detail. The tool strips named identifiers. You still weigh whether a unique event description could point back to one person before you share it.
Frequently asked questions
Can I review crisis cases for quality improvement?
Yes. Once a log is de-identified to the ICO standard, it is no longer personal data under UK GDPR. A CRHT team may study the response for quality improvement without further authorisation from the people involved.
Are bystanders’ names hidden?
Yes. A named friend, parent, or neighbour is an identifier in its own right. The tool flags each one so the caller cannot be traced through someone who was simply present or who made the call on their behalf.
Does s.136 give the crisis team a different confidentiality rule?
No. Section 136 is a police power to remove someone to a place of safety for assessment — it does not change how the resulting clinical record is protected afterwards. DPA 2018 and the NHS Code of Confidentiality still apply in full to the log once the immediate crisis response is over.