Privacy Policies

Introduction

In this document, ‘we’ ‘us’ ‘our’ etc. refers to The Lexicon Therapy Practice and/or the independent Clinical Psychologists who we manage.

Your privacy is very important to The Lexicon Therapy Practice and you can be confident that your personal information will be kept safe and secure and will only be used for the purpose it was given to us. We adhere to current data protection legislation, including the General Data Protection Regulation (EU/2016/679) (the GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. This privacy notice tells you what we will do with your personal information from initial point of contact through to after your therapy has ended, including:

• Why we are able to process your information and what purpose we are processing it for
• Whether you have to provide it to us
• How long we store it for
• Whether there are other recipients of your personal information
• Whether we intend to transfer it to another country
• Whether we do automated decision-making or profiling, and
• Your data protection rights.

We are happy to discuss any questions you might have about our data protection policy and you can contact us via our contacts page on our website. ‘Data controller’ is the term used to describe the person/ organisation that collects and stores and has responsibility for people’s personal data. In this instance, the data controller is The Lexicon Therapy Practice. We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ZB668749)

. We are registered with companies house with the company number 15353209. Our postal address is: THE LEXICON THERAPY PRACTICE LTD, 82A James Carter Road, Mildenhall, Suffolk, IP28 7DE. Our phone number and email address is can be found on our website.

Our lawful basis for holding and using your personal information

The GDPR states that we must have a lawful basis for processing your personal data. There are different lawful bases depending on the stage at which we are processing your data. These are explained below: 

If you have had therapy or psychological assessment with one of The Lexicon Therapy Practice’s independent Clinical Psychologists and it has now ended, we will use legitimate interest as our lawful basis for holding and using your personal information. If you are currently having therapy or psychological assessment, if you are in contact with The Lexicon Therapy Practice or one of its independent Clinical Psychologists to consider therapy, we will process your personal data where it is necessary for the performance of our contract and services to you. The GDPR also makes sure that we look after any sensitive personal information that you may disclose to us appropriately. This type of information is called ‘special category personal information’. The lawful basis for us processing any special categories of personal information is that it is for provision of health treatment (in this case psychotherapy or psychological assessment) and necessary for a contract with a health professional (in this case, a contract between your independent Clinical Psychologist and you).

How we use your information

Initial contact

When you contact us with an enquiry about our psychological services we will collect information to help us satisfy your enquiry. This may include personally identifiable information, such as your name, address, date of birth etc., as well as special category personal information like the nature and history of your psychological concern, health or medical information, such as psychiatric history, diagnoses, or medications, and any other information deemed necessary to make an informed clinical judgement as to the nature of your presenting complaint and other relevant factors. Alternatively, your GP or other health professional may send us your details when making a referral or a trusted individual may provide us your details when making an enquiry on your behalf. If you decide not to proceed I will ensure all your personal data is deleted within 1 year. If you would like us to delete this information sooner, please contact us. 

While you are accessing counselling

Everything you discuss with the independent Clinical Psychologists we manage is confidential. However, all Clinical Psychologists at times may discuss their caseload with an experienced clinical supervisor to ensure best practice and provide you the best possible care. Information about the nature of the case (though not necessarily full identifying information) is shared with the Clinical Psychologist’s supervisor, who is also bound to this same confidentiality policy.

Confidentiality will only be broken in rare and exceptional situations. Your Clinical Psychologist will always try to speak to you about this first, unless there are safeguarding issues that prevent this. These include:

• If your Clinical Psychologists forms the professional opinion that you or another individual is at risk of significant harm, a moral obligation may exist to act on this information with the aim of preventing such harm
• If we receive a subpoenaed from a court
• If you give permission to share your information by completing and signing a written consent form
• Where there is a legal obligation, such as to prevent money laundering.

We will keep a record of your personal details to help us provide the best possible service for you. These details are kept securely on our encrypted, secure GDPR compliant cloud based record software, or on password protected files stored on our Clinical Psychologists computers. and are not shared with any third party without your consent, except in the exceptional circumstances described above.

Clinical Psychologists will usually make and keep written notes of each session. These will not contain personally identifying information and are kept in a locked cabinet. For security reasons, text messages may be routinely deleted. If there is relevant information contained in a text message, we will store this on your patient record, generally for 7 years. Likewise, any email correspondence may be deleted regularly if it is not important. If necessary emails will be stored on your patient record, usually for 7 years.

After counselling has ended

Once treatment has ended, your records will generally be kept for 7 years, as is recommended by professional bodies, from the end of our contact with each you and are then securely destroyed. If you want us to delete your information sooner than this, please contact us.

Third party recipients of personal data

We may sometimes share personal data with third parties, for example, where we have contracted with a supplier to carry out specific tasks. In such cases we have carefully selected which partners to work with. We take great care to ensure that we have a contract with the third party that states what they are allowed to do with the data shared with them. We ensure that they do not use your information in any way other than the task for which they have been contracted and will include the minimum information required.

Your rights

We try to be as open as possible in terms of giving individuals access to their personal information. You have a right to ask us to delete your personal information, to limit how we use your personal information, or to stop us processing your personal information. You also have a right to ask for a copy of any information that we hold about you and to object to the use of your personal data in some circumstances. You can read more about your rights at ico.org.uk/your-data-matters. If we do hold information about you, we will:

• Give you a description of it and where it came from
• Tell you why we holding it
• Tell you how long we will store your data and how this decision was made
• Tell you who it could be disclosed to
• Let you have a copy of the information in an intelligible form.

You can also ask us at any time to correct any mistakes there may be in the personal information we hold about you. To make a request for any personal information we may hold about you, please put the request in writing addressing it to our email: [email protected]. If you have any complaint about how we handle your personal data please do not hesitate to get in touch with us by writing or emailing to the contact details given above or on our website. We would welcome any suggestions for improving our data protection procedures. If you want to make a formal complaint about the way we have processed your personal information, you can contact the ICO which is the statutory body that oversees data protection law in the UK. For more information please go to ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.

Data security

We take the security of the data we hold about you very seriously and as such we take every effort to make sure it is kept secure. Data are kept securely in password protected, encrypted, GDPR compliant cloud-based record software, password protected files, or locked in cabinets.

Visitors to our website

When someone visits our website, we use third party services to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. This information is only processed in a way that does not identify anyone. We do not make, and do not allow any of these companies to make, any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website. We use legitimate interests as our lawful basis for holding and using your personal information in this way when you visit our website. We use web analytics companies so that we can continually improve our service to you. Please contact us for more information about this. We use content management system companies to manage the system and contents of our website. Please contact us for more information. Like most websites we may use cookies to help the site work more efficiently – please view our cookie policy to find out about our use of cookies. No user-specific data is collected by us or any third party. If you fill in a form on our website, that data will be temporarily stored on the web host before being sent to us.