JT Psychological Consultancy Services Ltd: Clinical and Health Psychologists on the Isle of Man

Privacy Notice

GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is concerned with the personal information about you that we collect, store and share. This document details our GDPR policy.

Personal Information:

As psychologists we will collect both personal and sensitive data. The reason we collect your personal information is to enable us to deliver psychological therapy. We collect information at the point of initial contact (which might be via email, website contact page or phone call) as well as during the initial assessment session and any subsequent therapy sessions. The information we collect may include the following;

Name
Address
Date of birth
Gender (or preferred identity)
Telephone/SMS number/WhatsApp contact details (plus permission to send SMS and What App message and leave voice messages)
Email address
GP name and practice address
Occupation
Relationships
Psychological therapy history including any current or historical psychiatric diagnoses.
Medical conditions relevant to psychological therapy
Prescribed medication
Current psychological difficulties
Historical psychological difficulties
Lifestyle and social circumstances
Risk information such as suicidal and self-harming history and alcohol and drug use

Information Storage

We have implemented measures to ensure your personal and sensitive data remains secure. Your information may be stored in the following ways:

Paper: written notes which will include the initial email you sent or website contact sheet and therapy contracts. It may also include brief session notes if your psychologist keeps paper files (we do). These will be stored in a locked filing cabinet at 8 Finch Road, Douglas. Out of hours the clinic is secured by a locked front, secondary and clinic room door.
Smartphone: we may store your contact information in our contacts but access to these details are protected by password and or fingerprint access.
Email/SMS/WhatsApp: your email address will be stored in an email account (Jamie.teare@manx.net) should you wish to communicate via email. This account is password protected. Your telephone number may be stored in SMS or WhatsApp should you exchange messages this way with your psychologist. Access to this information is protected by biometric authentication (fingerprint). Electronic correspondence will also be held by the corresponding app (Gmail, Phone’s SMS, WhatsApp) all of which are GDPR compliant.
Website: none of your personal information is stored on JT Psychology website.
Electronic devices: All electronic devices (including computers, laptops, external hard drives, and mobile phone) used to access stored information will themselves be password protected.

How We May Process and Share Your Personal Information

Supervision:

As psychologists we have supervision with other qualified psychologists and therapists. Supervision is for our practice to ensure we are adhering to professional standards and evidence based ways of working. All of our supervisors are GDPR compliant and thus we are considered joint data controllers.

Sharing Information with your GP/Other Health Professionals:

Some clients like their GP (or other professionals involved in their mental health care such as a Psychiatrist or the BUPA mental health care team) to be kept informed of the work they are doing in psychological therapy.

This might include sending assessment/progress/discharge reports or having telephone conversations disclosing personal and sensitive information pertaining to you. We can discuss what and how much information is disclosed and you will be given an opportunity to make amendments before any letter/report is sent.

We will only send reports or have telephone discussions of this kind if we have your permission to do so and you can withdraw consent for correspondence at any point during therapy (assuming there is no duty of care to disclose information-please see the point below). Your GP and other health professionals should be GDPR compliant (we would check to ensure this before sending any confidential information) and thus would be considered joint data controllers.

Duty of Care and Confidentiality:

All the information you share with your us is treated confidentially unless you request we share it, for example with your GP. The only exclusion to confidentiality is if we suspect there is a risk of harm, either to you or someone else. If we thought there was such a risk, we would discuss it with you if at all possible so we could consider how we can best manage the risk, which may include involving your GP or other care agencies.

Only information relevant to managing the risk would be shared. If we don’t have your permission to share information and we deem there to be serious and imminent risk to yourself or someone else then our professional codes of conduct and the law may require that we inform an authority and share your personal information without your knowledge and permission.

E-Mail Exchange:

Although Manx Mail is GDPR compliant any confidential (e.g. personal and sensitive) information that we need to send to you will be typed into a memo, password protected and then attached to the email. We will inform you of the password in person or via text/ telephone. We advise you to share confidential information with us in the same way.

Postal Mail:

Should we send any confidential mail in the post (e.g. to you or your GP) this will be clearly marked ‘private and confidential’.

Erasing Your Information:

When you have finished psychological therapy, your psychologist will hold onto your information for a minimum of 8 years. This is in line with our professional code of practice and is for example so that we have a reference of our work in situations such as you returning to psychological therapy in the future. After this time has passed we will shred any written information via a confidential waste service and securely delete any electronically held information.

Your Rights:

You have the following rights…

To be informed what information your psychologist holds (i.e. to be given or have access to their individual privacy policy document)
To see the demographic information your psychologist has about you (free of charge for the initial request)
To make a ‘subject access request’ (SAR) to your psychologist for copies of your records. There may be an administrative charge for this and these will be provided within one calendar month of the request being made.
To rectify any inaccurate or incomplete personal information.
To withdraw consent to your psychologist using your personal information e.g. to withdraw consent for them to telephone you and request they contact you via email only.
To request your personal information to be erased (though your psychologist can decline whilst the information is needed for them to practice within their own professional code of ethics and conduct).

If you wish to assert any of these rights you should contact your psychologist.

We reserve the right to make changes to this privacy policy at any time and if you are in therapy with us we will send you notice of this via your agreed method of contact.