offering Counselling support Online
and In-person in Surrey, Berkshire & Hampshire
Innermost Counselling Privacy Policy
Introduction
Your privacy is important to us and Innermost Counselling Ltd (‘Innermost Counselling’) is committed to being a good custodian of your personal information, handling it in a responsible manner, and securing it with necessary industry standard administrative, technical, and physical safeguards.
Innermost Counselling is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), any personal data provided by you through any means (verbal, written, in electronic form, or by your use of this website) will be held and processed in accordance with the data protection principles set out within the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), informed by the Data Protection Act 2018.
When you request counselling with Innermost Counselling or otherwise provide your personal details to us, you will have provided informed consent to our processing of your data under the terms of this policy.
We follow two guiding principles when it comes to your privacy:
- Transparency – we work hard to be transparent about what personal information is collected and processed.
- Simplicity – we try to use easy-to-understand language to describe our privacy practices to help you make informed choices.
What personal information do we collect?
Counselling Requests – Registering with Innermost Counselling to request access to the counselling service can be done online, by email, by telephone or in person.
The request process involves providing your name, address, telephone number and email address. We may also request information on your availability, presenting issues, and other details which may be deemed relevant to processing your request.
Innermost Counselling is committed to the strictest of confidentiality during the counselling sessions and in doing so we follow an important principle of British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) Code of Ethics.
Counselling sessions afford you as the client the autonomy to share anything you wish to speak about in confidence and the information shared is used to provide clients with an expected level of professional service.
The counsellor at Innermost Counselling will not disclose any information shared by the client except for the two following situations:
- Serious harm – Your information may be shared with the relevant authorities if there is reason to believe that this may prevent serious harm being caused to you or another person.
- Compliance with law – Your information may be shared where Innermost Counselling is required by law to which it is subjected.
In either of these situations, the counsellor will endeavour to discuss with client the presenting situation which may limit the confidentiality.
Client Billing and Payment
Who might we share your information with.
To provide our Service to you in exchange for agreed payment, it is necessary to share essential payment information you may provide, with payment processing third party banking and accounting services strictly for the purpose of payment processing and required account keeping.
Safe Keeping of Personal Information
All personal information provided to Innermost Counselling is stored electronically on a secure cloud server using appropriate industry standard data security and encryption protocols and accessed using multifactor authentication.
Email communication relies on the inherent security of e-mail transmission protocols and stored on industry standard mail servers. The mailbox access is protected by password authentication to prevent unauthorised access.
All paper forms of personal information is converted to electronic form for cloud storage and the paper records are securely disposed of.
Any session notes are carefully anonymised and separated from client identifiable personal information and may be used in counselling supervision in line with BACP professional supervision requirements.
Resources and helpful information
From time to time, we may provide helpful links to healthcare and wellbeing resources and websites. These websites are not under our control and as a result, Innermost Counselling is not liable for any issues arising in connection with their respective use of your personal data, the website content or the services offered to you.
You may exercise caution and look at the privacy statement applicable to such websites of interest.
Use of Cookies
Innermost Counselling will never use marketing cookies or pass on your related information for third party organizations for marketing purposes and tracking users across the internet.
We will only use functional cookies to ensure necessary functioning of our website and statistics cookies to identify which pages are being used. This helps us analyse data about web page traffic and improve our website to tailor it to customer needs. This data is anonymised, and we only use this information for such analysis purposes.
As with numerous websites, we use Google Analytics to collect this generic, anonymised data from all visitors to monitor how our website is used.
Your Rights
You have the right to ask us to provide a copy of the information held by us. You also have the right to require us to correct any inaccuracies in your information. You may do either of these, by contacting us at data@innermostcounselling.com.
You may withdraw your consent for us to hold and process your data at any time. However, if you do this while actively receiving counselling your counselling would have to end. You can withdraw your consent by emailing data@innermostcounselling.com.
To afford you the right to access your data, and in line with ICO requirements, your data is retained by Innermost Counselling as follows:
- Data collected for the purposes of Innermost Counselling service enquires will be retained for 30 days following the satisfactory resolution of the original enquiry.
- All other counselling records are retained for a period of 3 years after the conclusion of counselling sessions.
This policy was last updated on 17 August 2022.
©Innermost Counselling Ltd 2022 Registered in England and Wales. No. 14019737 | Registered office: 45-55 International House, Commercial Street, London, Middlesex, E1 6BD, England, UK