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Your privacy is very important to me and I will endeavour to ensure your personal information is kept safe and secure at all times 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 Act 2018 (GDPR) and I am registered as a data controller with the Information Commissioners Office.

Collection of Personal Information

In the process of fulfilling my contractual agreement with you to provide a counselling service I will be required to collect personal information. This may include:

Name, gender, and date of birth.
Contact details such as address, email address, and telephone number
GP and emergency contact details.
Payment details held within my bank account following a bank payment transfer.
Assessment and session notes which may include information such as your personal history, medical conditions and diagnoses. These notes are gathered in order to ensure that I am able to provide you with best and most appropriate counselling service and assess how we will work together.

Sharing Personal Information

Your personal information is kept confidential and is only accessed by me. There are, however, some circumstances when I may be required to share information with a third party. These circumstances would include:

When you request for information to be shared
When I am compelled to disclose information by law.
When there is a risk of serious harm to yourself or others

Should I need to break confidentiality due to serious concerns for your safety or the safety of others I would always endeavour to discuss this with you first. If this is not possible I will disclose information for the sole purpose of protecting you or others from serious harm without your consent.

As a counsellor in private practice I am required to keep accounting records for taxation purposes. Under certain circumstances I may, therefore, be required to allow access to my financial records to my accountant or HMRC in order to comply with tax legislation. This information may include invoices and bank account details.

If I were to become incapacitated for any reason and unable to provide counselling services as contracted, your contact details would be shared with my therapeutic executor, who is another counsellor, for the sole purpose of informing you of the situation. No session notes will be shared, only contact details.

As a registered member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, I am required to have regular clinical supervision to ensure that I am working to the highest possible standards. During these session client issues may be discussed but no identifiable information is shared and you would remain completely anonymous.

Storage of Personal Information

All paper records are stored in a locked cabinet. Assessment and session notes are anonymous, coded and kept separately from contact detail in order to ensure your confidentiality as these notes cannot be matched with you.

Electronic correspondence in the form of email and SMS text messages are on devices which are password protected and only accessed by me. All devices use the latest firewall and virus protection.

Electronic correspondences relating only to contact arrangements are deleted after 1 month. All other data is retained for 5 years following the end of therapy at which time they will be securely destroyed. This information is retained for 5 years in order to comply with insurance requirements and to ensure a seamless continuation of therapy should you choose to return to counselling.

Website visitors
By accessing the website, you are consenting to the information collection and use practices described in this privacy notice. Should you choose to contact me using the contact form on the website none of the data that you supply will be stored by the website or passed to any third party data processors. Instead the data will be collated into an email and sent to me over the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). SMTP servers are protected by TLS (sometimes known as SSL) meaning that the email content is encrypted before being sent across the internet. The email content is then decrypted by local computers and devices.

The website uses cookies and Google Analytics. Almost all websites use cookies which are small files that get put on your computer by websites as you surf them. These cookies can store lots of information which can have privacy implications. Google Analytics is a service provided by Google that gathers anonymous data on how people are using websites and then provides visitor statistics, details of page views etc. This service is used by many website owners as the data helps website owners to improve their websites.

Some page elements are embedded from trusted third parties in order to provide you with Interactive Maps. This makes the website more helpful to you as a site visitor however most of these come with their own cookies. This applies to Google Maps. I do not control these cookies so I cannot guarantee what they do. In many cases the cookies are used to generate identical information to Google Analytics and indeed use Google Analytics, so opting-out of Google Analytics will also opt you out of these cookies too. You can opt out of Google analytics and other Google services here – http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout and https://www.google.com/dashboard/.

Your rights

The GDPR regulations of 2018 contain the following rights:

You have the right to request access to the information I process and store which relates to you.
You have the right to request that I amend incomplete or inaccurate personal information.
You have the right to request that your information is partially or completely deleted.
You can withdraw your permission for me to process your personal information.

There may, however, be certain circumstances where I may be required to retain information. An example of this would be if I were instructed to retain information by a court of law.

I am registered as a data controller with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) and my registration number is ZA785298. You have the right to complain to the ICO if you have concerns about the way I manage your personal data.

I endeavour to manage your data appropriately and in accordance with the prevailing regulations at all times. If you have any questions relating to this privacy policy please do not hesitate to contact me by email or telephone on davidbroadcounselling@gmail.com and 07780 858846 respectively.

Please be aware that this privacy statement may be updated from time to time.

David Broad