BE Psychology Privacy Policy

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BE Psychology is a company offering psychological services (assessments, reports, consultancy, supervision) and psychotherapy. This privacy policy explains how we use any personal information we collect about you, as a past, present, or future client or employee, or when you use our website.

 

1. Why do we collect information about you?
 

There are a number of lawful reasons for using (or 'processing') your personal information. One of these lawful reasons is called 'legitimate interests'.

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Broadly speaking, ‘legitimate interests’ means that we can process your personal information if:

  • We have a genuine and legitimate reason and 

  • We are not harming any of your rights and interests
     

This means that when you provide your personal details to us, we use your information for our legitimate business interests. In addition to this, we will also carefully consider and balance any potential impact on you and your rights.

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Another lawful reason for us processing your data may be ‘legal obligation’. This is likely to apply if you are being offered psychological services, and particularly if you are being assessed as part of a litigation claim. This means that:

  • We need to process your personal data to comply with a common law or statutory obligation.

 

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2. What information do we collect about you?

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We collect information about you that may include personal or sensitive information, such as:

  • First name or given name

  • Family name or surname

  • Address

  • Telephone numbers

  • Email address

  • Date of birth

  • Gender (or preferred identity)

  • Age

  • Date of birth

  • Relationships & children

  • Occupation

 

To make sure that you are assessed and/or treated safely, we record your personal information, such as your name, address, as well as all contacts you have with BE Psychology such as appointments and the information relating to your care/assessment. Your health records are kept confidential within BE Psychology at all times and are only shared with third parties (for example, insurance companies, general practitioners (GPs), and/or crisis/emergency services) when they need it to carry out their job (to receive an insurance payment) or statutory requirements (to manage an urgent risk to yourself or others). Whenever possible, we will inform you of sharing data first. 

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Clients undertaking private psychotherapy or assessments

When you are a client of BE Psychology, we record information about your appointments, assessments, and treatments so that your clinician can plan your treatment correctly. In addition to the personal information above, we may also collect information regarding:

  • Medical conditions (if relevant)

  • Prescribed medication

  • Psychological history and current difficulties

  • Sexuality

  • Offences (including alleged offences)

  • Family and/or relationships

 

Clients undertaking legal/court reports

In the case of a legal/court report, we retain and share the information as required by the courts or your solicitor.

In addition to the personal information above, we may also collect information regarding:

  • Medical conditions (if relevant)

  • Prescribed medication

  • Psychological history and current difficulties

  • Sexuality

  • Offences (including alleged offences)

  • Family and/or relationships

 

Job applicants, current and former BE Psychology employees, and associates

When you apply to work at BE Psychology, we will only use the information supplied to us to process your application and to monitor recruitment statistics. Where we want to disclose information to a third party, for example where we want to take up a reference or obtain a ‘disclosure’ from the Disclosure and Barring Service, we will not do so without informing you beforehand unless the disclosure is required by law.

 

Web access collection of information

We collect information about you when you register with us or place any order for services. We also collect information when you voluntarily complete contact forms. BE Psychology always tries to minimise the amount of personal information that we require in order to provide a specific service or feature.

 

3. How do we store the information about you?

 

We take your privacy very seriously.

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We are committed to taking reasonable steps to protect any individual identifying information that you provide to us. Once we receive your data, we make best efforts to ensure its security on our systems.

All personal information provided is stored in compliance with EU General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) rules. 

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4. How long do we keep your information for?

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Clients undertaking private psychotherapy or assessments

We will retain your information as set out in the NHS Code of Practice for Records Management (Records Management Code of Practice for Health and Social Care 2016).

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Clients undertaking legal/court reports

If your case is a legal/court report, we will keep your information until the end of your case, unless instructed otherwise by your solicitor. We rely on solicitors informing us when your case has ended, but we will contact them every 12 months in order to ascertain whether your case is ongoing and whether we are at liberty to destroy your records.

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Job applicants, current and former BE Psychology employees and associates

Personal information about unsuccessful job candidates will be held for 12 months after the recruitment exercise has been completed, after which it will be destroyed or deleted. Once a person has taken up employment with BE Psychology, we will compile a file relating to their employment. The information contained in this will be kept secure and will only be used for purposes directly relevant to that person’s employment. Once their employment with BE Psychology has ended, we will retain the file in accordance with the requirements of our retention schedule and then delete it.

 

5. Who do we share your personal information with?

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Your information is kept confidential within BE Psychology and is only shared with staff when they need it to carry out their job. All staff are required to work to strict professional and contractual codes of confidentiality, and where possible we will anonymise information so that individual patients cannot be identified.

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If we become aware of your intent to cause harm to yourself or another person, the law may require that we inform an authority without seeking your permission. In such a situation, the law may require that we share your personal information without your knowledge or consent.

By contacting the Information Security Officer, by email and/or using the address below, you can also get more details on:

  • agreements we have with other organisations for sharing information

  • circumstances where we can pass on personal data without consent, for example to prevent and detect crime and to produce anonymised statistics

  • our instructions to staff on how to collect, use and delete personal data

  • how we check that the information we hold is accurate and up to date


Clients undertaking private psychotherapy or assessments

In most circumstances, we will not disclose personal data without consent.

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Your information may be shared with outside organisations if they are directly involved in your care/case, for instance, your insurer if they are funding your treatment, your GP, or others involved in your care. We will discuss with you who we would discuss your care with, and what details we would share with them.

If your health is in jeopardy, we may share your contact information with your GP or an emergency healthcare service (e.g. Mental Health Crisis Team).

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In most circumstances, we will not disclose personal data without consent.

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When we investigate a complaint we may need to share personal information with other relevant bodies.

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If we do need to share your information, we will always try to gain your consent for this first. We may not be able to ask your permission under special circumstances where we are legally required to do so.

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Clients undertaking legal/court reports

Your information is likely to be shared with organisations directly involved in your care/case, for instance, your solicitor, the defendant’s solicitor, and the court. You should contact your solicitor to find out who they might share information collected at your psychology assessment with.

 

6. How you can access your information and correct it, if necessary?

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BE Psychology tries to be as open as it can be in terms of giving people access to their personal information. Individuals can find out if we hold any personal information by making a ‘subject access request’ or ‘right of access’ request under the Data Protection Act and the General Data Protection Regulation.

 

We will then supply to you:

  • A description of all data we hold about you

  • Inform you how it was obtained (if not supplied by you)

  • Inform you why, and for what purposes, we are holding it

  • What categories of personal data is concerned

  • Inform you who it could be disclosed to

  • Inform you of the retention periods of the data

  • Inform you around any automated decision making including profiling

  • Let you have a copy of the information in an intelligible electronic form unless otherwise requested.
     

To make a request to BE Psychology for any personal information, you must make the request in writing. You may also ask us to correct or remove information you think is inaccurate; please address these changes to the Information Security office, via “How to contact us”.
 

Clients undertaking legal/court reports

If your concern is related to a case with a solicitor that we are working for, please refer your queries through them. We may not be able to comply with a request to correct information we hold about you where it pertains to a litigation claim or court proceeding – this would need to be discussed with your solicitor.

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7. Your rights

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You have rights around your personal data and how we handle it. Please contact the Data Protection Officer if at any point you believe the information we process on you is incorrect and you want it corrected, you with to see this information, you request for your data to be transferred to a third party, you object to our processing your personal information, or you want to request that your data is deleted.

 

8. Complaints or queries

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BE Psychology tries to meet the highest standards when collecting and using personal information. For this reason, we take any complaints we receive about this very seriously. We encourage people to bring it to our attention if they think that our collection or use of information is unfair, misleading or inappropriate. We would also welcome any suggestions for improving our procedures. If you do have a complaint, please contact the Data Protection Officer who will investigate the matter on your behalf.

If you are not satisfied with the response from BE Psychology or believe we are not processing your personal data in accordance with the law you have the right to raise your complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)

Contact information ICO:
Website: https://ico.org.uk/concerns/
Email: casework@ico.org.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 303 123 1113

 

9. Other websites

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Our website contains links to other websites. Our privacy policy only applies to the BE Psychology website, and we would encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit.

 

10. Changes to this privacy notice

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We keep our privacy notice under regular review and we will place any updates on this web page. This privacy notice was last updated on 29 May 2018.

 

11. Who we are and how to contact us

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BE Psychology is the company that you are supplying your personal information to. Dr Brittni Jones is the Data Protection Officer for BE Psychology and can be contacted at:

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Email: drbrittnijones@bepsychology.co.uk

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Post: 
Information Security Officer
BE Psychology
Office 3
9-11 High Beech Rd
Loughton
Essex
IG10 4DP

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Telephone: 0203 411 0205

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