Your privacy is of upmost importance to me and I will take care to ensure I maintain your confidentiality in accordance with the current data protection laws and the ethical guidelines set out by the BACP. The BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) set out these guidelines to protect your confidentiality and ensure that your Counsellor is working to these guidelines and with professionalism.

As I will be holding your personal contact details as well as notes from our sessions, below is important information on how this will be stored and used.

Personal Information

I use Kiku (wearekiku.com) to collect and store your personal data. This is a secure, encrypted and password protected practice management platform.

In our first session, I will ask you to share some personal contact details such as name, address, email, telephone number, GP and what brought you to Counselling. Your personal information will be stored in Kiku and only I have access to this.

As a Counsellor, I do have to keep our clinical notes stored securely for a period of seven years after the end of therapy, so that I can respond to any potential requests regarding your clinical notes.

Please be reassured though that I will never pass on your details to any third party or use your data for anything other than my counselling service.

Confidentiality

Anything that is shared with me during our sessions will be kept confidential. I will only break confidentiality if I believe there is a concern for your safety, the safety of someone else or if I’m instructed to by a Court Law. It is a legal requirement for me to disclose any information I receive regarding acts of terrorism, drug trafficking, or money laundering.

It is also a legal requirement that I have regular supervision to discuss my clinical work. This is to ensure that I offer you the best service possible. These sessions are bound by confidentiality.

I keep clinical notes of each of our sessions so that I can keep a track of everything we discuss. These will be stored for seven years in a locked filing cabinet or within a password protected file within the Kiku system. After this time, they will be destroyed.

If any of our sessions are done remotely, they will be carried out on a video calling platform that offers end to end encryption to ensure we have maximum privacy. Please note that I cannot be held responsible for any breaches that occur due to failures with this technology.

Data usage

Contact between us will be either through email, phone or what’s app. I will be using a separate business email and phone number to my personal number and email and this will only be accessed by me during my working hours. I will only use your email or telephone number to contact you to arrange an appointment and to issue reminders of sessions via text or to share any information that may be relevant to your sessions and that has been discussed and agreed by you.

Your rights

GDPR 2018

Guidelines

I am registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the statutory body that overseas data protection law in the UK : Registration reference ZC205135. Should you have any concerns about my data protection policies, you can speak directly with me or with the ICO.

In the event of any breach of my data protection policies, I will notify you and the ICO within 72 hours and will seek to resolve this.

You can request to view the information I hold about you (contact details, appointments, clinical notes) at any time.

If I am incapacitated or die whilst working in counselling practice, I have a clinical will in place to notify people and secure and delete data. I have nominated Debbie Smith, who is a Counsellor. who will have access to my records only at this point to inform anyone I am currently work with, and work sensitively with them at this time, and to responsibly dispose of my records.

You have the right to see any information that I hold about you. Unless prevented so by legal reasons, I will provide this information to you within a month of your request. I am also happy to look at this within a session. You have the right to ask me to change any information that I hold that is incorrect and ask me to delete any information that I hold about you. I will do this except for any information I need to hold for legal purposes such as business tax purposes.

Complaints: If you wish to complain about how I hold your data in any way, then in the first instance, please contact me. If you have any further complaints which are not addressed, you should then contact the Information Commissioner’s Office at hhtps://ico.org.uk/concerns/handling or 0303 123 1113.

Contact: If you wish to contact me with questions, concerns, complaints or request your information, please discuss in session or contact me at 07852224304