PRIVACY POLICY

Privacy Policy
This Practice is committed to managing your psychological records with the highest regard for privacy and confidentiality, in full compliance with current professional and legal standards. While we have always ensured the security of your personal data by following the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) Code of Conduct and the Health & Care Professionals Council (HCPC) Standards of Conduct, Performance and Ethics, our practices have been further strengthened and clarified by the provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The GDPR requires us to specify the legal grounds for processing your personal data. Accordingly, we process your data on the basis of:
• Our contractual relationship with you
• Our ‘legitimate interest’ in retaining and processing your personal data

Contract
We process your personal data to fulfil our contractual obligations to provide the psychological services you have requested. All personal data you share with us will be used for your assessment and any subsequent interventions agreed upon. Processing your personal data is therefore essential to meeting our contractual commitments to you.

Legitimate Interest
In line with the nature of our relationship, you can expect that we retain your data to conduct psychological assessments, which may include neurodevelopmental and psychometric profiling, or other related services. This process involves handling special category data, such as details about an individual’s health, educational achievements, cognitive abilities, personality, interests, and family history. Depending on our agreement, we require this data to form a professional opinion and/or offer further advice, collecting only the necessary information for assessment, reporting, profiling, and advising.

We take our duty to protect and retain your personal data very seriously and will continue to do so in accordance with our professional codes and GDPR regulations. After the assessment,  information regarding children will be retained until they reach 25 years of age from the date the final report is issued. Information regarding adults will be kept for seven years after the last contact with them.

We retain only the information necessary for our records. Any reports obtained from external sources for case preparation will be kept digitally once the final report is issued, unless the client explicitly requests that these are deleted. For EHCP cases, all court documents and any unneeded reports will be securely destroyed using our confidential data shredding service.

Information is kept in two formats:

Paper Files
This has become increasingly rare.  When paper documents are provided, they are digitalised and the paper copy is either returned to the provider or destroyed using our confidential data shredding service.

E-Files
It is in our legitimate interest to maintain an electronic copy of essential reports and information to support the work of our Clinical and Educational Psychologists. For instance, a report from a past assessment might be required to support a request for an EHCP,  or to assist mature students applying for Disability Living Allowance (DLA) or Disability Student Allowance (DSA). Retaining your data may also support our decision-making if questioned or if a follow-up assessment is needed. We will not retain any unnecessary information, such as raw test data (at the discretion of the Clinical or Educational Psychologist), beyond the required retention period, even when electronic copies are stored indefinitely. Both hard copy files and e-files are securely stored.

Further Information
When you contact us through our website, any personal information you provide will remain confidential and will not be shared with third-party service providers.

Our website may contain links to external sites that we believe might be of interest to you. However, we are not responsible for the content of these sites. Users access these links at their own risk and should adhere to the respective sites’ terms and conditions.

Disclaimer
The information on our website is intended for general purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. You should seek specific guidance before taking any action, as we accept no responsibility for any loss arising directly or indirectly from your reliance on the information provided.

Due to the open nature of the Internet, we cannot guarantee that our site or any downloads will be free of viruses. You are advised to take all necessary precautions to ensure your own safety.

For more details about your rights and the GDPR, please visit https://ico.org.uk/.