Email Consent FAQs

You may have already provided us with your email address; however, we are confirming that we have the correct email address and that you agree with continued electronic communication.

On the consent form, you can choose to receive emails related to your medical care and/or anonymous patient experience surveys.

Consenting to the use of email at the WCH Family Practice Health Centre or the Crossroads Clinic opts you into receiving emails relevant to your medical care at those clinics, as well as patient experience feedback surveys and clinic community newsletters (which offer an opportunity to unsubscribe).

Medical care-related emails include things like:

• Automated appointment reminders and instructions
• Notifications about available test results
• Direct emails from clinic staff or providers.

Note, however, that not all clinics or providers use email to communicate with patients.

To withdraw or change your consent, contact your clinic or health care provider. Ask for a member of staff to resend you a consent form to your email inbox that you can complete and sign to update your consent.

Yes. To ensure these automated email communications are going to the right place, patients are encouraged to update their contact information with the hospital as soon as they can.

• If you have myHealthRecord, you can update your email address under your account settings.
• If you do not have myHealthRecord, please contact your clinic and you will be issued a consent form to your new email address.

Note: Patients of the Family Practice Health Centre or the Crossroads Clinic must contact the clinic or their provider to update their email address. Changes to a patient’s email address in myHealthRecord account settings will not update the email address in their Family Practice or Crossroads medical record.

WCH is moving towards a more paperless future with fewer phone calls. We hope that, over time, many appointment-related letters and calls will be replaced with emails. Currently, only some clinics and departments are equipped to use automated email communications. If your prefer to continue receiving letter mail or phone calls about your appointments even when email becomes available in your clinic, you can decline email consent for medical-care related communications on your consent form.

It is important that patients protect themselves from phishing attempts, which are when “bad actors” try to imitate an organization like a bank or hospital to obtain private information. WCH will never ask you to provide any passwords or financial information by email. If an email says it is from WCH, check the email address in the “From” field of the email carefully. It should always end in “@wchospital.ca”. WCH’s email consent forms are sent to patients from “noreply@wchospital.ca”. If you are ever in doubt or believe you have received an email from someone who is trying to impersonate the hospital, please email privacy@wchospital.ca.

Entering your date of birth helps us be sure that the person providing consent is, in fact, the patient that the consent form was intended for.

You may have already provided us with your email address and receive emails from myHealthRecord; however, we are confirming that we have the correct email address and that you agree with continued electronic communication.

The email consent form gives WCH permission to send you emails. The communication preference settings in myHealthRecord allow you to control the types of emails you receive from the myHealthRecord website/application.

Primary care clinics at WCH (The Crossroads Clinic and Family Practice Health Centre) use an electronic medical record system that is different from the one used by other departments and clinics at the hospital. These two systems record patient consent are different. To ensure patient choice is honoured, anyone who is a patient of a primary care clinic and another hospital clinic may be asked to consent twice to ensure that their preferences are captured by both clinics.

Primary care clinics at WCH (The Crossroads Clinic and Family Practice Health Centre) use an electronic medical record system that is different from the one used by other departments and clinics at the hospital. These two systems record patient consent are different. To ensure patient choice is honoured, anyone who is a patient of a primary care clinic and another hospital clinic may be asked to consent twice to ensure that their preferences are captured by both clinics.

It is the responsibility of every healthcare provider and organization to understand how patients want to be communicated with, therefore WCH has a responsibility to collect consent for the communications specifically related to your care at WCH.

WCH has heard from our patients that text messages (SMS) related to their care are something they’re very interested in. We are currently exploring options that will meet the needs of our patients and are expecting to have a system implemented in the next few years.

To prepare for that future, patients are encouraged to ensure their clinic has their most up-to-date phone contact information, and to let their secretary know when they’re providing a mobile number versus a landline number at check-in (as these are different fields in the medical record).

Patients can also update this themselves through account settings within their myHealthRecord accounts.

This is up to you as the patient. If you provide someone else’s email to a secretary or clinician when prompted, WCH will assume that’s the email you want to use for any relevant communications, just like when you provide a mailing address or phone number.

At WCH, our patients’ experiences are important to us. We ask patients to complete anonymous surveys about their care and experiences so we can improve our programs and services.

When you opt in to patient experience surveys on the email consent form, you agree to receive occasional emails with links to web-based surveys from WCH and our approved partners. These surveys allow you to provide us with anonymous feedback. If you opt out on the consent form, you won’t receive any survey emails.

Even if you opt in, you can still choose not to complete the survey or unsubscribe from survey emails.  By unsubscribing, you will no longer receive requests to complete that particular survey, but you may receive emails from other WCH survey partners. If you want to stop receiving all survey emails, please contact your clinic to receive a new consent form so that you can update your preferences.