Privacy Policy

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This Privacy Policy explains how Peaks Counselling uses and protects your information when you use this website, contact us via telephone, email, Facebook, and/or use our therapy services. 

Peaks Counselling is registered with the Information Commissioners Office:

Data Protection Officer: Mr Simon Paul Oliver 

Reference number: ZB252850  

YOUR RIGHTS

We respect your right to control your data. You have a right to update, correct or delete your personally identifiable information at any time by contacting us. Your rights include:

• The right to be informed about how we capture, store and use your data.
• The right of access. If you wish to obtain a record of the personal data we hold about you, 
• The right to rectification. If we have captured information about you that is inaccurate or incomplete, we will update it.
• The right to erase. You can ask us to remove or randomise your personal details from our records.
• The right to restrict processing. You can ask us to stop using your personal data.
• The right to data portability. You can ask to obtain your personal data from us for your own purposes.
• The right to object. You can ask to be excluded from marketing activity.
• We respect your right not to be subject to a decision that is based on automated processing.

Further details of your rights and how to contact the ICO is available at their website:

https://ico.org.uk/

THE INFORMATION WE MAY COLLECT

When using our Website 

By visiting this website you are accepting and consenting to the collection of basic non-personal information stored in the form of cookies. These cookies are used by our webpage service provider to inform us of about the unique number of visitors and pages visited. 

If you use the contact form on the website this will also provide more personal information to us using the contact form fields. This information is not stored by the website provider, but is provided to us in the form of an email. This would include your name, email address and you may also include a contact telephone number if you choose to include one. Peaks Counselling will only use this information in order to respond to your query, and it may be stored whilst we maintain the preliminary dialogue. We will never use your personal information to send you advertising materials nor will we ever sell or share your data with a third party for any marketing purposes. Should you choose not to progress to free consultation, any stored contact information will be deleted. 

When contacting us 

If you make contact via phone, email or Facebook, only contact details required to respond to your enquiry or to provide a requested service to you are stored by us, and will be deleted once contact has ended. 

When using Peaks Counselling Services

Peaks Counselling is committed to protecting your privacy. If after contacting us you choose to explore whether therapy with us is for you, you will be offered a free 1/2 hour consultation. 

During this consultation we will collect personal information like:

- Name

- Contact Details

- Age

- Your GP contact details

We may also collect more sensitive information (Special Category Data) during this initial consultation and this may include:

- Your physical and mental health history (this may also extend to family members where pertinent)

- Current physical and mental health symptoms including but not exclusively 

- Questionnaire responses and scores 

- Relationship status and history

- Religion

- Gender and Sexuality

This information is processed by Peaks Counselling to assess our suitability to provide you services and your suitability for the talking therapy services provided by Peaks Counselling.

Should we both agree that talking therapy is suitable for you, we will also ask you to complete and return our 'Counselling and Confidentiality Agreement' which details the terms and limitation of our relationship. Your agreement to this is required prior to the first session full session. Your collected personal information, sensitive information, and signed agreement will be retained for the duration of the therapy with us, and securely destroyed/deleted once our services end.

Your therapist may also make therapy notes after each of the therapy sessions or additional contact you have with them. These are anonymised and stored separately from other identifying information kept only to enable us to find these records. We retain these for three years following the end of your therapy. 

Updated: Jan 2021