Introduction

Your privacy is very important to us and you can be confident that your personal information will be kept safe and secure and will only be used for the purpose it was given. We adhere to current date protection legislation, including the General Data Protection Regulation (EU/2016,679) (the GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003.

This privacy notice tells you what we will do with your personal information from initial point of contact through to after your therapy has ended, including:

• Why we are able to process your information and what purpose we are processing it for

• Whether you have to provide it to us

• How long we store it for

• Whether there are other recipients of your personal information

• Whether we intend to transfer it to another country

• Whether we do automated decision-making or profiling, and

• Your data protection rights

We am happy to chat through any questions you might have about my data protection policy and you can contact me via email at anna@forrescounselling.com and neil@forrescounselling.com.

‘Data controller’ is the term used to describe the person/organisation that collects and stores and has responsibility for people’s personal data. In this instance, the data controller is me.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office and my registration reference is C1562501.

Anna’s number is 07759209079 and email address is anna@forrescounselling.com. Neil’s number is 07703469098 and email address is neil@forrescounselling.com.

My lawful basis for holding and using your personal information

The GDPR states that we must have a lawful basis for processing your personal data. There are different lawful bases depending on the stage at which we are processing your data. We have explained these below:

If you have had therapy with us and it has now ended, we will use legitimate interest as our lawful basis for holding using your personal information.

If you are currently having therapy or if you are in contact with us to consider therapy, we will process your personal data where it is necessary for the performance of our contract.

The GDPR also makes sure that we look after any sensitive personal information that you may disclose to me appropriately. This type of information is called ‘special category personal information’. The lawful basis for me processing any special categories of personal information is that it is for provision of health treatment (in this case counselling) and necessary for a contract with a health professional (in this case, a contract between you and Forres Counselling).

How we use your information

Initial contact

When you contact us with an enquiry about our counselling services we will collect information to help us satisfy your enquiry. This will include name, a method of contact (usually phone and/or email) and a brief outline of your counselling requirement if you are happy to provide it (this, however, is not essential at initial contact stage). Alternatively, your GP or other health professional may send us your details when making a referral or a parent or trusted individual may give us your details when making an enquiry on your behalf.

If you decide not to proceed, we will ensure all your personal data is deleted within one month. If  you would like us to delete this information sooner, just let us know. 

While you are accessing counselling

Rest assured that everything you discuss with us is confidential. That confidentiality will only be broken if we believe that you are a danger to yourself or to someone else or have told me about criminal activity likely to endanger you or someone else. We will always try to speak to you about this first, unless there are safeguarding issues that prevent this.

We will keep a record of your personal details to help the counselling services run smoothly. Skeleton details (enough to contact you for the arrangement of sessions) are kept on a password protected phone and laptop. Your full intake details are kept in a locked filing cabinet accessible only by us, Anna and Neil. Written session notes are kept on a password protected laptop. None of these – contact details or session notes - are shared with any third party.

For security reasons we do not retain text or WhatsApp messages for more than three years. Likewise any email correspondence will be deleted after three years.

After counselling has ended

Once counselling has ended your records will be kept for three years from the end of our contract with each other and are then securely destroyed. If you want us to delete your information sooner than this, please tell us.

Your rights

We try to be as open as we can be in terms of giving people access to their personal information. You have a right to ask us to delete your personal information, to limit how we use your personal information, or to stop processing your personal information. You also have a right to ask for a copy of any information that we hold about you and to object to the use of your personal data in some circumstances. You can read more about your rights at ico.org.uk/your-data-matters

If we do hold information about you we will:

• Give  you a description of it and where it came from;

• Tell you why we are holding it, how long we will store it and how we made this decision;

• Tell you who is could be disclosed to;

• Let you have a copy of the information in an intelligible form.

You can also ask us at any time to correct any mistakes there may be in the personal information we hold about you.

To make a request for any personal information we may hold about you, please put the request in writing to anna@forrescounselling.com or neil@forrescounselling.com.

If you have any complaint about how we handle your personal data, please do not hesitate to email us at either of the addresses given above. We welcome any suggestions for improving my data protection procedures.

If you want to make a formal complaint about the way we have processed your personal information you can contact the ICO which is the statutory body that oversees data protection law in the UK. For more information, go to ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.

Data security

We both take the security of the data we hold about you very seriously and as such we take every effort to make sure it is kept secure using password protected devices and locked filing cabinets.

If you fill in a contact form on our website, that data will be temporarily stored on the web host before being sent to us.