Hope Park Counselling Centre Privacy Notice
Information about you: how we use it and with whom we share it
The information you provide will be used by Hope Park Counselling Centre, the University of Edinburgh to:
- provide you with a counselling service
- offer and manage your appointments with us
- register your attendance at counselling sessions
- record any donations that you make
- manage requests from you for information to be passed on to third parties, for example other health providers
- contact you to request anonymous feedback about your experience of our service
- comply with our legal obligations for financial purposes
- collate anonymised aggregate data for use in statistical research
- collate anonymised aggregate data for statistical purposes for service improvement.
We process this data to meet the legitimate interests of Hope Park Counselling Centre as a practice, training, and research centre.
A record of your donations is processed to comply with our legal requirements.
If you later consent to one or more of your counselling sessions, or part of a counselling session, being audio recorded by your counsellor, the data will be used for the purpose of client care in supervision or a formal assessment of practice
If, after concluding your sessions at Hope Park you consent to potentially being contacted by a researcher, we will use your data to contact you to ask if you wish to participate in a research request.
Gift Aid declaration data are processed under Income Tax Act 2007
Information about you will be shared with relevant authorities if:
- You have given your consent to disclose the information.
- A counsellor would be liable to civil or criminal court procedure if the information were not disclosed.
- A counsellor believes you and/or others are in serious danger.
We will hold the personal data you provided us as below
Client notes, personal data, record of your donation, signed consent to audio recording, and signed consent forms for a GP letter will be retained for seven years from the date of your initial appointment
Forms that you have signed to give your consent to be approached to participate in research are retained for one year.
If we contact you to ask if you wish to participate in a research project your signed consent form is retained for five years
Gift Aid declarations are retained by the University for six years after the end of the tax year of the last claim for which that declaration was used.
Records of your financial donations are retained for six years plus one financial year from the date the donation was made.
If you have any questions, please contact
Data controller and contact details
For data collected under this privacy notice, the University of Edinburgh (the “University”) is the Data Controller (as that term is defined in the EU General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679), registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office, Registration Number Z6426984.
You can contact our Data Protection Officer at dpo@ed.ac.uk. Our data protection policy is on our website here.
Data sharing
In addition to the primary purposes, we are also legally obliged to share certain data with other public bodies such as HMRC and will do so where the law requires this; we will also generally comply with requests for specific information from other regulatory and law enforcement bodies where this is necessary and proportionate.
Your rights
You have the right to request access to, copies of and rectification or (in some cases) erasure of personal data held by the University and can request that we restrict processing or object to processing as well as (in some cases) the right to data portability (i.e. the right to ask us to put your data into a format that it can be transferred easily to a different organisation). If you wish to make use of one of these rights, please email your local contact.
If we have asked for your consent in order to process your personal data you can withdraw this consent in whole or part at any time. To withdraw consent, please email your local contact, who will explain the consequences of doing so in any particular case and initiate proceedings for withdrawing consent.
Complaints
If you are unhappy with the way we have processed your personal data you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at casework@ico.org.uk but we ask that you raise the issue with our Data Protection Officer first.