Privacy Policy

Any personal data provided by you to ‘Counselling with Steve’ through any means (verbal, written, in electronic form, or by your use of the website) will be held and processed in accordance with the data protection principles set out in the Data Protection Act 2018. For the purposes of data protection correspondence, Steve Kelly is the data controller for Counselling with Steve and may be contacted at info@counsellingwithsteve.com

All personal data is processed lawfully for the legitimate interest of my counselling service. Refusing to allow data processing means I cannot enter into a therapeutic contract with you. This is because I need to be able to process certain information in order to provide a safe and professional service to my clients. This includes making contact with clients for the purpose of counselling and to keep clients informed about appointments. Personal information may also be retained in clinical notes to aid the therapeutic process.

What information do I collect?

I will store your name, telephone number address and email address alongside any other personal information that you submit on the booking form. If paying online I will also process any payment information that you provide. I may also retain clinical notes about our counselling sessions. These notes may contain what is termed ‘sensitive’ personal data under the Data Protection Act, for example, religious identity, sexual orientation etc. This information is processed lawfully under substantial public interest conditions, namely provision of a confidential counselling service (DPA, 2018: Part 2, paragraph 17). The ‘Counselling with Steve’ website is hosted on Wix.com and they may retain certain personal information about you. As per Wix’s Privacy Policy, clients of Counselling with Steve may ask for a file of the data Wix hold and also request deletion of that file from Wix. I will also ask for you name, address, contact details for your g.p. and other information that may be relevant to your wellbeing while taking part in therapy. This will be detailed on our electronic contract, implemented by Pandadoc.com. Please see here for Pandadoc's Privacy policy.

Will my personal data be shared with anyone?

All personal information processed by Counselling with Steve is strictly confidential. The only time I would share this information is if a) I was legally required to do so e.g. reporting terrorism or money laundering, or if I was subject to a court order requiring me to share information, or b) if I had to share information with medical or social services in order to prevent serious harm to you or another individual. I would, wherever possible, inform you of the need to share your personal information prior to any disclosure.

How will my data be kept safe?

Wix is a commercial website host company and as such employs industry standard security for any information held on its servers – see here for information on the security measures employed. Pandadoc similarly is a trusted commercial company and information on its security can be found here. Any clinical notes I take are stored electronically in a password protected and encrypted file on my home computer and backed up on a secure cloud service. These notes contain no personal identifying information and are linked to your name via a code. Your name and code are kept in a book which is stored in a locked firesafe in my home.

How long will you store my personal information.

To comply with insurance and tax regulations I will retain personal information for 7 years after the end of the tax year in which sessions took place.

Your legal rights.

You have the right to access any data that I hold about you, or any data held by Wix about you in relation to the Counselling with Steve website. Please email info@counsellingwithsteve.com to request a copy of this information.

You have the right to request erasure of any data held about you by me or by Wix. The decision to comply with this request will depend upon legal and insurance requirements of holding personal information. Please email info@counsellingwithsteve.com with any requests for erasure or any other concerns about personal data which I may hold and I will in good faith try to accommodate your concerns or requests.

Cookies

My website is hosted by Wix.com and captures both Session (Transient) & Persistent (Permanent/Stored) cookies.

Session (Transient) cookies: these cookies are erased when you close your browser, and do not collect information from your computer. They typically store information in the form of a session identification that does not personally identify the user.

Persistent (Permanent/Stored) cookies: these cookies are stored on your hard drive until they expire (i.e based on a set expiration date) or until you delete them. These cookies are used to collect identifying information about the user, such as Web surfing behavior or user preferences for a specific site.

Click here for more information about cookies including how to delete them from your computer.