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.

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:

 • 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

• Whether I intend to transfer it to another country,

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

• Your data protection rights.

I am happy to chat through any questions you might have about my data protection policy and you can contact me via [insert preferred method of contact] ‘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. I am registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office [registration no: ZB669356].

My postal address is: 43 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LW . My email address is: hayeswoodtherapy@gmail.com

My lawful basis for holding and using your personal information

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).

How I use your information

Initial contact

When you contact me with an enquiry about my counselling services, I will collect information to help me satisfy your enquiry. This might include:

• Contact details, such as your telephone number and email address

• Initial information you might share with me about your need for counselling

Alternatively, your GP or other health professional may send me your details when making a referral or a parent or trusted individual may give me your details when making an enquiry on your behalf. If you decide not to proceed, I will ensure all your personal data is deleted within 6 months. If you would like me to delete this information sooner, just let me know.

While you are accessing counselling

Rest assured that everything you discuss with me is confidential. That confidentiality will only be broken if:

 ·      You tell that you or someone else is at risk of harm. I would always aim to speak to you about this first and explore if there is a course of action that I might take with your knowledge, to ensure safety. Sometimes this might not be possible. In this case, I will always seek your consent and be transparent about the need to share information and with whom I will share it, as well as the information that will be shared. For instance, I might need to contact your GP, the emergency services or social services.

• An exception to the above would be if to do so would put others at an increased, and immediate, risk of significant harm.

• When required by a court of law. 

I will keep a record of your personal details to help the counselling services run smoothly, taken via a ‘client intake form’. These details are kept securely in a locked cabinet.  I will keep brief typed notes of each session, which will be encoded and kept in password protected files on an encrypted hard drive which is also stored in a locked place.

Best practice requires counsellors to have regular supervision, in which I might discuss some aspects of our work together. However, they also abide by the same code of BACP ethics as myself, keeping all information confidential as outlined above.

For security reasons I do not retain text messages for more than 6 months. If there is relevant information contained in a text message I will digitally transcribed it and it to your secure notes. Likewise, any email correspondence will be deleted after 6 months. Similarly, if it includes important information will be transcribed into your secure notes.

 After counselling has ended

Once counselling has ended your records will be kept for 7 years from the end of our contact with each other and are then securely destroyed. If you want me to delete your information sooner than this, please tell me.

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. I take great care to ensure that I have a contract with the third party that states what they are allowed to do with the data I share with them. I ensure that they do not use your information in any way other than the task for which they have been contracted.

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/your-data-matters.

If I do hold information about you I will:

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

• tell you why I am holding its, 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 Eleanor Hayeswood at hayeswoodtherapy@gmail.com.

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.

Data security

Why include this? In this section you’ll explain how you provide ‘adequate security’ for the personal data you hold. This will vary considerably depending on what systems you use. It will need to cover storage of paper documents as well as your use of IT devices (PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones How it might look

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 use encrypted devices and locked filling cabinets to store any data. All mobile devices are password protected and/or use face recognition.

Visitors to my website

When someone visits my website, a Squarespace site, to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. I do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. This information is only processed in a way that does not identify anyone. I do not make, and do not allow Squarespace to make, any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting my website.

I use legitimate interests as my lawful basis for holding and using your personal information in this way when you visit my website. You can read Squarespace’s privacy notice here: https://www.squarespace.com/privacy

I use Squarespace as the content management system for our website. Squarespace and data protection. Like most websites we use cookies to help the site work more efficiently - find out about the use of cookies: https://www.squarespace.com/cookie-policy. 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 temporarily stored on the web host before being sent to me.