Website
Privacy Policy

Dr Laura Barnes Psychology Practice respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal data. This privacy notice will provide you with information about how we look after your personal data when you visit our website (regardless of where you visit it from) and tell you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.

This privacy notice aims to give you information on how we collect and process your personal data through your use of this website, including any data you may provide through this website and when you contact us. For information on how we collect, process and store data that is collected in the course of providing therapeutic services (for example, notes from assessment and subsequent sessions, outcome measures and reports), please refer to our Confidentiality Policy.

We have what is known as legitimate interest for keeping data. We are registered with the ICO in order to do so. We follow the rules outlined by our professional regulator, the HCPC, and our representative body, the British Psychological Society.

It is important that you read this privacy notice together with any other privacy notices or confidentiality notices we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal data about you, so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your personal data. This privacy notice supplements those other notices and is not intended to override them.

The personal data we collect 

Personal data means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together as follows:

  • Identity Data: includes your first name, last name, title, and any further identity data disclosed by you in an online enquiry.

  • Contact Data: includes address (home, postal or other physical address), email address and telephone numbers, and any further contact data disclosed by you in an online enquiry.

  • Transaction Data: includes details about payments to and from you and other details of services you have purchased from us. Payments are made via bank transfer. We do not collect or process your bank account or payment card details.

  • Technical Data: includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access our website.

  • Usage Data: includes information about how you use our website, products and services.

How we collect personal data

We use different methods to collect data from and about you including through:

  • Direct interactions: You may give us your Identity Data, Contact Data by filling in forms, by corresponding with us by post, phone, email, via our website or otherwise, or when you enter into a contract with us for the provision of our services.

  • Automated technologies or interactions: As you interact with our website, we may automatically collect Technical Data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies, server logs and other similar technologies. We may also receive Technical Data about you if you visit other websites employing our cookies. Please see our cookie policy for further details.

  • Third parties or publicly available sources: We may receive personal data about you from third-party analytics providers, namely Google Analytics. Please see our cookie policy for further details.

For information on how we collect, process and store data that is collected in the course of providing therapeutic services (for example, notes from assessment and subsequent sessions, outcome measures and reports), please refer to our Confidentiality Policy.

How we use the data we collect

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. We may collect and process the personal data about you for the following purposes:

  • Responding to contact from you – if you contact us with an enquiry, we will use your Identity Data and Contact Data to respond to you.

  • Business and service administration - including contacting you to schedule phone calls, appointments and to process payments.

  • Website administration – we may use your Identity Data, Contact Data and Technical Data for the purpose of protecting our business and our website, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data. This is necessary for our legitimate interest in running our business, the provision of administration and IT services, network security, to prevent fraud, and for compliance with our legal obligations. If you contact us to report a fault with our website, we will use the Identity Data and Contact Data provided for the purposes of rectifying that fault in accordance with our legitimate interests.

  • Website Analytics – as you navigate our website, Technical Data and Usage Data may be collected automatically. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the website, and to help us to improve the content of the website and to customise the content or layout of the website for you, in accordance with our legitimate interests. This is necessary for our legitimate interest in defining types of customers for our products and services, to keep our website updated and relevant, to develop our business and to inform our marketing strategy.

We may also use personal data which you provide to us, where the law allows us to do so, as follows:

  • To deal with and/or respond to any enquiry or request made by you prior to entering into any contract or agreement with us or as a result of such contract or agreement.

  • Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you.

  • Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation, including the prevention of crime or harm.

  • Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.

How we won’t use the data we collect

We will not share your personal information with third parties for marketing purposes.

​​Disclosure of personal data

Your personal data will not be disclosed to any other individuals or other entities except in the following circumstances:

  • Where it is necessary for the performance of our contract with you, including where you have asked us to do so or where we need to take steps to enforce any contract which may be entered into between us.

  • Where we are under a legal duty to do so in order to comply with any legal obligation.

  • In order to protect the rights, property or safety of our business, our customers and others.

Security

We are committed to ensuring that your personal data is secure. In order to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the personal data we collect. Where personal data is shared with third parties in line with this privacy notice, responsible measures are used to protect your personal data.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

The transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our website; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your personal data, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.  We urge you to take every precaution to protect your personal data when you are on the internet.

Data retention

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

For example:

By law we have to keep basic information about our customers (including Contact, Identity, Financial and Transaction Data) for 6 years after they cease being customers for tax purposes.

Your rights

You have the right to:

  • Request access to your personal data (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal data that we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.

  • Request correction of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data that we hold about you corrected, although we may need to verify the accuracy of the new personal data that you provide to us.

  • Request erasure of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you have successfully exercised your right to object to processing (see below), where we may have processed your personal data unlawfully or where we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law. Please note, however, that we may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request.

  • Object to processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground as you feel it impacts on your fundamental rights and freedoms. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal data for direct marketing purposes. In some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your personal data which override your rights and freedoms.

  • Request restriction of processing of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in the following scenarios: (a) if you want us to establish the data’s accuracy; (b) where our use of the data is unlawful but you do not want us to erase it; (c) where you need us to hold the data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or (d) you have objected to our use of your data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.

  • Request the transfer of your personal data to you or to a third party. We will provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Note that this right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the information to perform a contract with you.

  • Withdraw consent at any time where we are relying on consent to process your personal data. However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent. If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. We will advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent. 

If you wish to exercise any of your above rights, please send a written request to us at the address listed at the end of this privacy notice, addressed for the attention of the ‘data protection contact’.

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data or to exercise any of your other rights. However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive.  Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

Other websites and links

Our website may contain links to other websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control third party websites and are not responsible for their privacy notices or for the content, accuracy or opinions express in such websites.  We do not investigate, monitor or check third party websites for accuracy or completeness and the inclusion of any linked website on or through our website does not imply approval or endorsement by us of the linked website.

If you decide to leave this website and access these third-party websites, plug-ins and/or applications you do so at your own risk.  We encourage you to read the privacy notice of every website you visit.

Changes to this privacy notice

This version was last updated on 14 September 2021.

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us.

Data Controller

For data subject access requests and other queries about how your data is processed, please contact drbarnespsychology@gmail.com.

Complaints

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO so please contact us in the first instance.