Introduction
My website address is renoatestherapy.co.uk.
Your privacy is very important to me 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 to me.
I adhere to current data 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.
I am registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office with registration number C1387697. My email address is: hello@renoatestherapy.co.uk.
This privacy notice tells you what I will do with your personal information from initial point of contact through to after your therapy has ended, including:
- How I collect your data
- Why I am able to process your information and what purpose I am processing it for
- Whether you have to provide it to me
- How long I store it for
- Whether there are other recipients of your personal information
- Your data protection rights.
I am happy to discuss any questions you might have about my data protection policy and you can contact me via email.
‘Data controller’ is the term used to describe the person or organisation that collects and stores and has responsibility for people’s personal data. In this instance, the data controller is me.
How I collect your data
I keep a record of your contact details (name, phone number, email address and home address) to help the counselling service run smoothly, and so I can contact you about counselling. I collect this data via a form in my ‘Working Agreement’ which is provided to all clients upon agreeing to work together. These details are kept securely in a password-protected digital file, and online for the purposes of maintaining a clinical will (see ‘Clinical will’ below for more information).
I also keep handwritten notes of the content of each session.
Data security
I take the security of the data I hold about you very seriously and as such I take every effort to make sure it is kept secure. I keep digital information in a password-protected file on my local drive.
Your confidential clinical notes are kept physically in locked filing cabinet. I am the only person who has access to this filing cabinet and your notes are never shared with anyone else.
Data retention and deletion
For security reasons I do not retain text messages or emails for more than 6 months. If there is relevant information contained in a text message I will save this with your personal data in a password protected folder. Any email correspondence will be deleted after we have finished working together.
Once counselling has ended your records will be kept for 7 years from the end of our work together and will then be securely destroyed. If you want me to delete your information sooner than this, please tell me.
Your rights
I try to be as open as I can be in terms of giving people access to their personal information. You have a right to ask me to delete your personal information, to limit how I 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 I 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/for-the-public.
If you request information that I hold about you, I will:
- give you a description of it and where it came from
- tell you why I am holding it, tell you how long I will store your data and how I made this decision
- tell you who it could be disclosed to
- let you have a copy of the information in an intelligible form.
You can also ask me at any time to correct any mistakes there may be in the personal information I hold about you. To make a request for any personal information I may hold about you, please put the request in writing addressing it to hello@renoatestherapy.co.uk.
If you have any complaint about how I handle your personal data please do not hesitate to get in touch with me by writing or emailing to the contact details given above. I would welcome any suggestions for improving my data protection procedures.
If you want to make a formal complaint about the way I 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.
Clinical will
I have a clinical will. This allows a trusted therapist colleague (my “Clinical Trustee”) to contact you should I become unable to do this through serious illness, or death. Your name, pronouns, email address, phone number and session time are kept on a secure, GDPR compliant website called ClinicalWill.app. In the event of my death, or becoming incapacitated, my clinical trustee will access this website to contact you with information about what has happened, and how long I will be unavailable for (if applicable).
Visitors to my website
No user-specific data is collected by me or any third party. If you fill in a form on my website, that data will be emailed directly to me and will not be stored elsewhere.