Privacy Policy | SOUTHAMPTON REFLEC

Your privacy is very important to Southampton Reflections Counselling 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 Southampton Reflections Counselling. We adhere to the current data protection legislation, including the General Protection Regulation (EU/2016/679) (the GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Privacy and Electronic communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003.

The privacy notice tells you what we will do with your personal information from the initial point of contact through to after your therapy has ended, including:

Why Southampton Reflections Counselling are able to process your information and what purpose we are processing it for
Whether you have to provide it for Southampton Reflections Counselling
How long we store it for
Whether there are any other recipients of your personal information
Whether we intend to transfer it to another country
Whether we do automated decision-making or profiling, and
Your data protection rights

Your therapist is happy to chat with you through any questions you might have about our data protection policy and you can contact Southampton Reflections via email at leanne.srcounselling@gmail.com or steve.srcounselling@gmail.com depending on who your therapist is.

'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 both Leanne and Steve, depending on who your therapist is.

Both Leanne and Steve are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office;

Leanne - registration number ZB250732

Steve - registration number

Leanne’s phone number is: 07579 051021 and email address is: leanne.srcounselling@gmail.com

Steve’s Phone number is: 07342 796284 and email address is: steve.srcounselling@gmail.com

Our Lawful basis for holding and using your personal information

The GDPR states that Southampton Reflections Counselling must have a lawful basis for processing your personal data. There are different lawful bases depending on the stage at which we are processing your data. I have explained these below:

If you have therapy with Leanne or Steve and it is now ended, they will use legitimate interest as our lawful basis for holding and using your personal information.

If you are currently having therapy or if you are in contact with Southampton Reflections to consider therapy, Leanne or Steve will process your personal data where it is necessary for the performance of our contract.

The GDPR also makes sure that Southampton Reflections Counselling look after any sensitive personal information that you may disclose to us appropriately. This type of information is called 'special category personal information'. The lawful basis for Leanne or Steve 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 your therapist and you).

How we use you information

Initial contact

When you contact Leanne or Steve with an enquiry about our counselling services they will collect information to help Southampton Reflections satisfy your enquiry. This will include your name and contact details. Alternatively, your GP or other health professional may send Southampton Reflections your details when making a referral or a parent or trusted individual may give Southampton Reflections your details when making an enquiry on your behalf.

If you decide not to proceed all your personal data is deleted within seven days. If you would like Southampton Reflections to delete this information sooner, just let Leanne or Steve know

While you are accessing counselling

Rest assured that everything you discuss within Southampton Reflections is confidential. That confidentiality will only be broken if your therapist feels there is a risk of immediate harm to you or to others, or there is a safeguarding issue. Your therapist will always try to speak to you about this first, unless there are safeguarding issues that prevent this.

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

Your therapist will keep written notes of each session, these are kept secure in a locked box with the key stored separately.

For security reasons your therapist does not retain text messages for more than one week. If there is any relevant information contained in the text message your therapist will take a note of this and keep it in your notes file. Likewise, any email correspondence will be deleted within one week if it is not important. If necessary your therapist will take any relevant information and add it to your notes file.

After counselling has ended

Once counselling has ended, your records will be kept for 3 years from the end of our contract with each other and are then securely destroyed. If you want your therapist to delete your information sooner than this, please tell your therapist.

Third party recipients of personal data

Your therapist may share personal data with third parties, for example, where they have contracted with a supplier to carry out specific tasks. In such cases they have carefully selected which partners they work with. Southampton Reflections Counselling take great care to ensure that we have a contract with the third party that states what they are allowed to do with the data we 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

At Southampton Reflections Counselling, we try to be open as we can in terms of giving people access to their personal information. You have a right to ask your therapist to delete your personal information or to stop processing your personal information. You also have the right to ask for a copy of any information that we 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 your therapist does hold information about you they will:

give you a description of it and where it came from;
tell you why they am holding it, tell you how long they will store it your data and how they 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 your therapist at any time to correct any mistakes there may be in the personal information they hold about you.

To make a request for any personal information your therapist may hold about you, please put the request in writing addressing to either leanne.srcounselling@gmail.com or steve.srcounselling@gmail.com depending on who you therapist is

If you have any complaint about how your therapist handles your personal data please do not hesitate to get in touch with Southampton Reflections by writing or emailing to the contact details given above. I would welcome any suggestions for improving our data protection procedures.

If you want to make a formal complaint about the way Southampton Reflection Counselling 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

Southampton Reflections Counselling take the security of the data we hold about you very seriously and as such our therapists take every effort to make sure it is kept secure. We provide adequate safety by using password protected devices and locked filing boxes and we delete electronic communications within the limited time frame

Additional information for website owners and employers

Visitors to our website

When someone visits the Southampton Reflections Counselling website, we use a third party service, Wix to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We 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 any one. I do not allow Wix make any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting my website.

We use legitimate interests as our lawful basis for holding and using your personal information in this way when you visit our website.

Southampton Reflections Counselling use Wix analytics so that we can continually improve our service to you. You can read Wix's privacy policy here

Southampton Reflections Counselling use Wix content management system as the content management system for our website - find out about Wix content management system and data protection.

Like most websites we use cookies to help the site work more efficiently - find out about the cookies used on this website here

No user-specific data is collected by Southampton Reflections 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 Southampton Reflections