Privacy Policy
Your privacy is very important to me (Shae Harmon) 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 am registered with the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK’s independent body set up to uphold information rights.
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 info @ shaequeertherapy.com
‘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 (Shae Harmon). I am registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office - Registration number ZB571987.
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 filled out a form on this site for me to contact you, I process this information with your consent.
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.
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.
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 will include full name, email and phone number.
Alternatively, your GP or other health professional may send me your details when making a referral or a trusted individual may give me your details when making an enquiry on your behalf. Please ensure they have your consent when doing so.
If you decide not to proceed I will keep your personal details (name, email and phone number) for 7 years unless you request deletion sooner.
While you are accessing counselling
Rest assured that everything you discuss with me is confidential. Supervision is a part of our professional duty of care to clients. I have a supervisor which I discuss my cases with, who is also held to the same standards of confidentiality I am in line with our membership body COSRT - who outlines our professional standards.
I do not share personal data with my supervisor. We refer to clients with their first name only or initials.
Confidentiality will only be broken if required by law or if I believe there is a danger to your safety or others. I will always try to speak to you about this first, unless there are safeguarding issues that prevent this.
I will keep a record of your personal details to help the counselling services run smoothly. These details are kept securely on Google Drive Cloud Services and Write Upp. I will keep written notes of each session, these are kept in a password protected tablet and/or in Google Drive Cloud Storage/WriteUpp.
If there is relevant information contained in a text message I will add this to your notes, and any email correspondence will be deleted after 7 years if it is not important.
In the event of my death or incapacitation, my supervisor will be able to access your contact information and let you know.
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 get in touch as below.
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, such as video conference calling and accounting. 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.
Below are the suppliers and their privacy policies:
Clinical Will.app to store your info in case of my death or incapacitation
Squarespace forms which collects your initial information
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.
Your data protection rights
Under data protection law, you have rights including:
Your right of access - You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information.
Your right to rectification - You have the right to ask us to rectify personal information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete.
Your right to erasure - You have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances.
Your right to restriction of processing - You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.
Your right to object to processing - You have the the right to object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.
Your right to data portability - You have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances.
You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.
Please contact me at info@shaequeertherapy.com if you wish to make a request. Note that I try to respond as quickly as possible, and have up to 30 days.
You can read more about your rights on the ICO site.
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.
I keep records of consent, and any withdrawal of consent, on our files for as long as your personal information is being used in-line with that consent and for a period of 7 years after the consent is withdrawn (unless otherwise requested by you).
You can also ask me at any time to correct any mistakes there may be in the personal information I hold about you.
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 see the ICO complaints policy.
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. Details are kept securely on Google Drive Cloud Services and are not shared with any third party. I keep written process notes of each session, these are kept in a password protected tablet and/or in Google Drive Cloud Storage.
In case of a data breach: I will notify the ICO within 72 hours and inform those individuals it may affect without undue delay and keep a record of any personal data breaches.
At the appropriate time, I delete all data securely and completely off of my devices and cloud storage.
Visitors to my website
When someone visits my website, I use a third party service, Squarespace, 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.
Squarespace collects personal data when you visit this website, including:
Information about your browser, network and device
Web pages you visited prior to coming to this website
Web pages you view while on this website
Your IP address
Squarespace needs the data to run this website, and to protect and improve its platform and services. Squarespace analyses the data in a depersonalised form.
I use legitimate interests as my lawful basis for holding and using your personal information in this way when you visit my website. I use Squarespace so that I can continually improve my service to you. You can read Squarespace’s privacy notice here. I use Squarespace as the content management system for my website too - find out about measures and data protection here.
No user-specific data is collected by me or any third party.
When you submit information to this website via webform, we collect the data requested in the webform in order to track and respond to your submissions. We share this information with Squarespace, our online store hosting provider, so that they can provide website services to us. We also share this information with Google Drive Cloud Services for storage.
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