What This Policy Covers
This policy explains how personal information supplied through this website is handled. It covers the details you type into an enquiry form and the information collected automatically while you browse, and it describes what this site actually does rather than every situation in the abstract.
The guiding principle is narrow: information you supply is used to administer your enquiry and nothing else. That is why the forms here ask for as little as they do. The policy is organised by question rather than by legal heading.
The Information Collected Through the Forms
When you submit a support question or general enquiry, the site collects the details requested by the form and whatever you choose to write in its free-text description field.
Those details allow the team to respond, arrange appointments where requested, and determine whether the service operates in your area.
The free-text field is different, because you decide what goes in it, and whatever you write is stored along with the rest of your enquiry. That is the reason we suggest not setting out a detailed medical history in a first message. An enquiry form is not a secure channel for sensitive information; a note that there is something relevant to discuss is enough, and the detail belongs in a conversation with a clinician.
Nothing is collected covertly. The information held about you is the information you typed in, plus the analytics described further down this page. No data about you is bought in from anywhere else, and no profile is assembled from other sources.
Why It Is Collected, and on What Basis
The purpose is narrow: to respond to your enquiry and administer your dealings with us in connection with it. Your details are not used to market unrelated products, and are not sold or rented.
The legal basis for using them is your consent, given at the point you submit the form. The consent statement on the enquiry form says so directly: by pressing submit you agree that we can contact you using the details you have supplied, and that those details will only be used to contact you in relation to that specific enquiry. That is a deliberately limited permission, and it is the whole of what is being asked for.
Consent can be withdrawn. If you send an enquiry and then decide you would rather we did not hold your details, ask for them to be removed. No reason is needed, and asking affects nothing already discussed with you.
Who Else Sees Your Information
Your enquiry details are not sold, rented or passed to third parties for their own marketing. There is no data broker in this arrangement and no list your address is added to.
Two categories of third party are unavoidable in any website, and naming the categories is more honest than implying nobody is involved. The first is the company hosting the site, since submitted data has to live on a server somewhere; the stated position is that the host is certified and compliant with data protection requirements. The second is the analytics provider described above.
One legal exception applies to every organisation and is worth stating rather than hiding. If we were required by law to disclose information, under a court order or a valid request from a public authority, we would have to comply. No privacy policy can promise that away.
Where Your Information Is Stored, and For How Long
Personal data submitted through this website is stored on the website's own database, with no separate copies kept elsewhere. That simplicity benefits you directly: when you ask for your data to be removed, there is one place it lives rather than several.
It is held for as long as it is needed for the enquiry it relates to, and for any period afterwards that we are required to keep records for. If an enquiry comes to nothing there is no reason to hold the details indefinitely, and you can ask for erasure at any point rather than waiting for a period to elapse.
Requires confirmation: a specific retention period in months or years is not published anywhere on this site. Rather than state a figure that has not been set, this section describes the principle. A defined retention period should be confirmed and added here.
Keeping Your Information Secure
Reasonable steps are taken to protect the information held about you, including a hosting arrangement stated to be certified for data protection compliance, and limiting access to enquiry data to those who need it.
No website can promise perfect security, and any that does should be treated with suspicion. What can be said is that the amount of personal data collected here is deliberately small. Collecting less is one of the most effective security measures available.
Your Rights Over Your Own Data
UK data protection law gives you a set of rights over information held about you. This site operates a request process for each of them, and using it costs nothing.
Asking to see or download your data
You can request a copy of the data held about you. A confirmation step is required before the request proceeds, helping prevent somebody else from requesting your data. Once confirmed, a download is prepared and its link expires after 48 hours.
Asking for your data to be erased
You can request that your data be removed. A confirmation step verifies the request came from you. Once confirmed it goes to an administrator, and any content you have published on the site is dealt with in the same process, either reassigned or removed, with comments anonymised rather than deleted outright.
If you have no content on the site, you receive confirmation along with a six digit token. Keep it: it exists so that, if data needs recovering afterwards, the request can be identified. Once erasure is complete, information that identified you is no longer linked to your enquiry record.
Asking for your data to be corrected
If something held about you is wrong, you can ask for it to be put right. The same confirmation process applies, after which an administrator deals with it.
Making a complaint
You can raise a complaint about how your data has been handled through the same request process. If the response does not satisfy you, you may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's independent data protection regulator. That right exists regardless of anything in this policy.
Children and Young People
This website is aimed at adults and its forms are designed to be completed by adults. It is not directed at children, and no part of it is intended to collect information from a child.
If you believe a child has submitted details through a form here, get in touch and ask for them to be removed. Such a request will be acted on, with no requirement to explain yourself first.
Requires confirmation: a minimum age for using the site or for treatment is not published anywhere. It has not been invented here, and it should be confirmed and stated.
Changes to This Policy
This policy may be updated from time to time, for example if the way information is collected changes or if the law does. The current version is always the one published on this page, and continuing to use the site after a change means the updated version applies.
How to Raise a Data Protection Question
Requests and questions about your data go through the website's official enquiry form. State clearly that your enquiry concerns data protection rather than an appointment so it can be handled correctly. The enquiry route is described on the contact page, and the conditions covering use of this website are in the terms and conditions.
You can also raise something with the regulator directly. The Information Commissioner's Office handles UK data protection complaints and publishes its own contact details; you need no permission from us to approach it.
Data protection enquiries: submit them through the official enquiry form and identify the subject clearly in your message.