Privacy Policy

Confidentiality & Privacy

Confidentiality is a core element of maintaining our clients privacy. We will however need to hold client contact information. This will be minimal information such as your name, contact number and emergency contact details. This information will allow us to keep in contact with you whilst you are a client. A month after counselling has ended we will delete your personal contact details. We will securely archive your anonymised notes and store these according to the Data Protection Act for 7 years, as a requirement of our practice. We never sell or share your personal information or data.

We are registered, as individual practitioners, with the ICO and adhered to the regulations that set out the standards for how we manage your data and maintain your privacy. In addition, we work within the BACP ethical framework that specifically addressed the standards for maintaining the confidentiality of notes and client information. For more information please follow the links below by clicking on the relevant title.

• BACP
• ISO standards
• GDPR

We may keep brief notes from our sessions that will be confidential – in the same way any health notes are kept by your GP. These session notes will be securely stored and will be kept separately from your personal information so that you are not identifiable as an individual. Everything you share with us in sessions will be confidential. The exceptions to this would be as follows:

• When required to do by the prevention of Terrorism Act
• Risk to yourself or others, including children.
• When the law requires it.

Before any breach of confidentiality, we will wherever possible discuss this with you first. You have a right to see your notes and we would like you to know that you can ask to see these at any time in the counselling process. You have a right to ask us to make any corrections to those notes if on reading these you feel they are incorrect. You have the right to ask us to delete your data. We will be happy to do this. If you withdraw your permission for us to hold your data we will not be able to continue counselling. If you have any concerns or worries about your personal data please do talk to us about this.

Supervision

We follow both the BACP NCS ethical frameworks and therefore are required to have supervision where we take the work but not you the client. The purpose of supervision is to ensure that we are practising ethically and to maintain the standards set by BACP/NCS.