Privacy Notice

Your privacy is important 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 the General Data Protection Regulation (EU/2016/679) (the GDPR).

I am happy to discuss any questions or concerns you may have about my data protection policy and you can contact me via email.

Lawful Basis

The GDPR states that I must have a lawful basis for processing your personal data. There are different lawful bases depending on the stage at which I am processing your data. I have

explained these below:

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

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

The GDPR also makes sure that I 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 me and you).

Your rights

You have a right to know my intentions with the data you provide to me. You may view or amend your data when you wish, but I ask that you allow a month for these acts to be carried out.

Initial contact

When you contact me with an enquiry about my counselling services, I will collect information to help me satisfy your enquiry. This will include your name, address, phone number, email address and date of birth. I will also ask for an emergency contact or general practitioner’s contact details. This will include their name, address, contact number, email address and the nature of your relationship. This contact’s information will only be used for times in which I have concern for your wellbeing.

While you are accessing counselling

I have an ethical obligation to ensure that everything you discuss with me is confidential.

That confidentiality will only be broken if I consider you to be a threat to yourself or someone else, or if legally ordered to disclose. I will always try to speak to you about this first, unless the situation is an emergency, or if I am legally restrained from doing so.

I will keep a record of your personal details to adequately perform the counselling agreement. These details are kept securely on my password protected laptop or drive, or hardcopies kept in a locked cabinet.

I will keep written notes of sessions and may administer some psychological assessments, these are kept on my password protected laptop or drive, or hardcopies in a locked cabinet.

Third Parties

I sometimes share personal data with third parties, for example, where I have contracted with a supplier to carry out specific tasks. In such cases I have carefully selected which partners I

work with. This can include financial or tax advisors seeing invoices or other financial records. But please note these third parties also commit to confidentiality and will only use this information to carry out purposes related to our agreement.

After counselling has ended.

Once counselling has ended, our contractual agreement, your contact information form, our email records, invoices and calendar information will be kept for 7 years. Your session notes will be kept for the same time period, but under an identification number. These data will be safely stored on a password protected laptop or drive, or hardcopies in a locked cabinet. You have the right to request to view or amend this data within this time frame and I will try to achieve these requests within one month. Thereafter, these data will be appropriately deleted or destroyed.

Security

As outlined above, the measures in place are there to ensure that your information is kept securely. While I will always try to make sure these data are kept safely, I of course cannot prevent certain unpredictable circumstances such as hacking or theft.