Redaction here means removing personal identifiers from a referral assessment. These pages hold dense personal history. The Data Protection Act 2018 and the NHS Code of Confidentiality govern these records. anonym.plus does the work on your machine. Sharing a referral assessment between services also sits under the Caldicott Principles, given statutory footing by the National Data Guardian for Health and Social Care Act 2018 — they set the information-governance test for whether a disclosure between providers is justified.
When this applies
The document was sent from an NHS Trust's single point of access (SPA) team to a receiving community mental health team, and lists the client, an emergency contact, and a prior provider. You want to file a sample for staff training, fully de-identified.
How anonym.plus handles it
- Open the document in anonym.plus on your device.
- Local OCR reads scanned questionnaires too.
- It flags client and contact names, dates, and providers.
- Review each flag and keep the history fields.
- Replace each value with a label, or hide it.
- Save the clean copy. The source stays local.
What you need to provide
- The assessment file (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 |
|---|---|---|
| Client | PERSON | Devon Pratt → [CLIENT_1] |
| Emergency contact | PERSON | sister Mara → [FAMILY_1] |
| Prior provider | ORGANIZATION | Hillcrest Mental Health Trust → [PROVIDER] |
| Visit date | DATE_TIME | Seen 22/01/2026 → [DATE] |
| Phone | PHONE_NUMBER | +44 7911 200173 → [PHONE] |
| NHS number | NHS_NUMBER | NHS 412 081 2345 → [NHS_NO] |
Compliance achieved
- Strips identifiers under DPA 2018 & NHS Code of Confidentiality.
- A handover between services also engages the Caldicott Principles, put on a statutory footing by the National Data Guardian for Health and Social Care Act 2018 — de-identifying the training copy sidesteps that test entirely.
- Local only, so no cloud processor contract is needed.
- Forms are protected with AES-256-GCM.
- Also meets UK GDPR Art. 9 for special-category health records.
Anonymise referral assessments offline — see plans & start free →
Limitations & cautions
These documents gather more detail than later notes. The tool removes named identifiers. You still review long free-text answers for a stray clue before you share the copy.
Frequently asked questions
Why are referral assessments sensitive?
They collect a full history at once: contacts, prior care, and personal events that a shorter note would never gather in one place. That density means more identifiers to catch, which the tool flags for you across the whole document.
Are emergency contacts removed?
Yes. A named relative or friend listed as an emergency contact is an identifier in its own right. The tool flags each one so the client cannot be traced through a contact even if their own name is already hidden.
What are the Caldicott Principles, and do they apply here?
They are the UK's long-standing information-governance test for sharing confidential patient information between organisations, now backed by the National Data Guardian for Health and Social Care Act 2018. A fully de-identified training sample never triggers that test, because it no longer identifies anyone the principles are there to protect.