PRIVACY POLICY

Anchor Psychology is run by Dr Kajal Patel, a HCPC registered Clinical Psychologist, running a small independent practice offering clinical psychological services. It is important that you feel comfortable with and are clear on how any personal information you share will be looked after or used. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use and store your personal information (this means any information that identifies or could identify you) as a past, present, future client (service user or patient) or when you use the website.

We may change and/ or update this policy from time to time so please check this page to ensure that you continue to be comfortable with the measures that we are taking to protect your privacy. This policy is effective from 31st May 2021.

For the purpose of the Data Protection Act 1998 (the Act), and (from 25 May 2018) the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (“Data Protection Law”) the data controller is Dr. Kajal Patel.

Please contact Dr. Kajal Patel with any questions or requests about the personal information we process by:

How I collect information about you

As a provider of psychological services, our work is focused on the assessment and treatment of mental health problems, emotional and behavioural issues and difficulties in family relationships. We will only ever collect information about you or contact you in relation to your clinical care.

We collect information in the following ways:

  • When you contact us directly to enquire or book assessment or treatment sessions. This includes when you telephone or e-mail us.
  • When you complete your registration and consent forms prior to treatment.
  • When you complete questionnaires as part of your clinical care, before, during and after treatment.
  • In the form of clinical process notes which facilitate us in planning your treatment. Process notes are taken during sessions, during telephone consultations and/ or when we are involved with discussions with third parties about you/ or your child (always with your explicit permission).
  • When you decide to share letters or reports with us about you/ your child written by third parties.
  • When you contact us by letter/ e-mail/ telephone during or after assessment/ treatment.
  • We may receive general information about you when you visit the Anchor Psychology website from other sources, such as Google Analytics, which might include which pages are visited most often.  We also use “cookies” to help the site run effectively. See ‘Cookies’ below for more details.

Information we collect and how it is used

Personal Information

Personal information we collect includes details such as your name, date of birth, email address, postal address, telephone number, family living situation, school or workplace name, your family doctor (GP), health insurance details as well as information you provide in any communications between us regarding your emotional and/or physical health.  You will have given us this information while registering for treatment or in any other communication between us.

We will mainly use this information:

  • To facilitate your clinical care and ensure you receive the highest standard of service.
  • To keep a record of your relationship with us.
  • Manage financial aspects of running the business, for example invoicing, receipts, tax returns

If you do not provide this information we may be unable to offer a psychological assessment and intervention.

Sensitive Personal Information

In the course of psychological assessment and intervention it is common for clients to share sensitive personal information about themselves and/ or the experiences of a friend or family member and we may also collect this health information.  Any Sensitive Personal Information provided will always be treated in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

A special note about the Sensitive Personal Information we hold   

General Data Protection Regulation (2018) recognises that some types of personal information are more sensitive and need additional protection. Sensitive Personal Information can include information about a person’s health, race, ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, genetics, sex life or sexual orientation.

We will only use this information:

  • For the purposes of your clinical care, quality monitoring or evaluating the services we provide.
  • Your information may be shared with outside organisations if they are directly involved in your care, for instance, your insurer if they are funding your treatment, your GP, or others involved in your care.  We will discuss and agree with you who we would discuss your care with, and what details we would share with them.
  • We will not pass on your details to anyone else without your express permission except in exceptional circumstances. Examples of this might include concerns about the safety of an individual we are working with or someone else being at risk of harm, or where there is a legal duty, for example a Court Order, or to prevent a miscarriage of justice. Where possible we would not take any action without discussing it with you first to agree who we will contact and the most helpful way to do this.

Legal basis for using your information

There are lawful reasons that allow data controllers to process your personal information and one of those is called ‘legitimate interest’. This means that the reason that we are processing information is because there is a legitimate interest for us to process your information in order to provide psychological assessment and treatment.

We make sure that we take into account your rights and interests whenever we process your Personal Information under the lawful basis of ‘legitimate interest’.

The additional legal condition required for processing special category data (or Sensitive Personal Information) is that processing is necessary for the purposes of preventive or occupational medicine, medical diagnosis and/ or the provision of health care

Keeping your information safe

We take looking after your information very seriously. In order to prevent unauthorised access, alteration, destruction or disclosure we have put in place appropriate reasonable physical, electronic and organisational measures to protect the personal information we have under our control in compliance with EU General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) rules.

Unfortunately the transmission of information using the internet is not completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information sent to us this way, we cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted by e-mail. If you wish to send an email containing personal information please use a password protected document or other secure means.

How long we hold your information for

Information is held for as long as is reasonable and necessary for your clinical care and in line with current guidance from relevant professional bodies. The British Psychological Society Professional Practice Guidelines  (3rd Edition) on Managing Data and Confidentiality currently recommends that information is held for 7 years after the end of treatment. For young people seen when they were under the age of 18 years information is held until they are 25 years old in line with NHS code of practice for records management.

Your rights

You have various rights in relation to the personal information we hold about you – please see below.  If you wish to exercise any of these rights or make a complaint, you can do so by contacting us by email at kajal@anchorpsychology.co.uk and/or by phone on 07514 874 561.

  • Access to your personal information: You have the right to request access to a copy of the personal information that we hold about you. You can make a request for access free of charge.  Please contact us for an access request form. In some circumstances it may not be possible to release the information about the individual to them, for example, if it contains personal data about another person.
  • Right to object: You can object to our processing of your personal information when we are doing so on the basis of legitimate interest. Please contact Dr Kajal Patel to discuss any objections you may have.
  • Consent: We do not ask for consent to hold your personal information because this is not the legal basis on which we collect and store information. You are therefore not able to withdraw your consent, however you can object to the legitimate basis for holding your information as outlined above.
  • Rectification: You can ask us to change or correct any inaccurate information we hold about you, or add to it if it is incomplete
  • Erasure: You have the right to ask us to delete your personal information where we have no lawful basis for keeping it.
  • Portability: You can ask us to provide you (or a third party) with a copy of the personal information that we hold about you in a structured, commonly used, electronic form.
  • Restriction: You can ask us to restrict the processing of the personal information we have about you

Please note, some of these rights only apply in certain circumstances and we may not be able to fulfil every request.

We try to meet the highest standards when collecting and using personal information and welcome any suggestions for improving our procedures. If you do have a complaint or believe the collection or use of your information is unfair, misleading or inappropriate, please do contact Dr Kajal Patel. If you are not satisfied with our response 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.ukTelephone: +44 (0) 303 123 1113

Cookie Policy

This site uses cookies – cookies are small text files that are placed on your machine to help the site provide a better user experience. They let sites recognise your device, so that the site can function, or function more effectively, and also store information about your preferences and how you use the site. A cookie cannot collect any personal information about you from your device and, by itself, cannot be used to identify you.

This site uses the following categories of cookies:

  • Strictly necessary cookies  which are essential for you to move around my site and to use its features
  • Performance cookies which collect anonymous information about how you use the site, such as which pages are visited most, how long you spend on each page and what links you click.

As a rule, cookies will make your browsing experience better. However, you may prefer to disable cookies on this site and on others. The most effective way to do this is to disable cookies in your browser. We suggest consulting the Help section of your browser or taking a look at the About Cookies website which offers guidance for all modern browsers

Google Analytics Cookies

We use a programme called Google Analytics, which in turn uses cookies to help us find out how many people visit this site, which pages and parts are most popular and how long people spend in each area. All of this information is used to help us develop and improve the site. All information these cookies collect is collated and therefore anonymous.

You can find out more about Google Analytics here developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookie-usage