Privacy policy - Anna Ringqvist Access Counselling

Introduction

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
Your data protection rights.

I am happy to talk through any questions you might have about my data protection policy, and you can contact me via email with your questions. ‘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, Anna Ringqvist. I am registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office, registration number ZB410697.

Business name: Access Counselling, UK

URL: https://access-counselling.com

Email: anna@access-counselling.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 service, I will collect information to help me satisfy your enquiry. This will include your name, contact details and the nature of your enquiry.

If you decide not to proceed, I will ensure all your personal data is deleted within three months, unless we have agreed otherwise. 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 disclose information regarding terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering, if there is a child protection issue or if I have reason to believe you or someone else is at risk of serious harm. I will always aim to speak to you about this first, unless there are safeguarding issues that prevent this. I have a legal duty to release any client notes if required by a judge or coroner.

I will keep a record of your personal details to help the counselling services run smoothly. These details are stored securely on a password protected drive and are not shared with any third party.

I will keep anonymised, hand-written notes of each session. These paper notes are kept securely locked away.

For security reasons I do not retain text messages on my phone. If there is relevant information contained in a text message I will copy it onto a password protected drive and delete that information after counselling has ended. Any email correspondence will be deleted after counselling has ended.

After counselling has ended.

Once counselling has ended, your records will be kept for five 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 contact me.

Third party recipients of personal data

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. Third parties who may access some of your personal details are HMRC, my accountant, ICO, WordPress, Fasthosts, Zoom, Mailchimp and Microsoft 365. 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/for-the-public/your-data-matters-blog/.

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 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 anna@access-counselling.com.

If you have any complaint about how I handle your personal data please do not hesitate to get in touch with me by 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

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 password protection for secure access to any data held digitally, and all paper documents are stored locked away.

Visitors to my website

Like most websites we use some essential cookies to help the site work more efficiently.

I use a third-party service 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.

No user-specific data is collected by me or any third party when visiting this website. If you fill in the contact form on my website, that data will be temporarily stored on the web host before being sent to me.

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.