Privacy Policy

Who we are

Our website address is: http://www.ascendingmindspsychology.com.

Ascending Minds Psychology (AMP) is a company offering psychological services to individuals and organisations. This privacy policy explains how we use any personal information we collect about you, as a past, present, future employee or associate, a service user (client or patient) or when you use our website.

Ascending Minds Psychology provides Psychological consultations, assessments and therapy. This privacy notice provides information about the personal information we process about you as a data controller, in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Our ICO registration number is ZA315352

Please contact us at info@ascendingmindspsychology.com with any questions or requests about the personal information we process.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

We collect information about you that may include personal or sensitive information, such as:

First name or given name
Family name or surname
Address
Telephone numbers
Date of birth
Gender (or preferred identity).
Age.
Date of Birth.
Relationships & children
Occupation.
Address.
Telephone/SMS number
Email address

To make sure that you are assessed and/or treated safely and appropriately, we record your personal information, such as your name, address, as well as all contacts you have with AMP such as appointments and the results of assessments and letters relating to your care/report. Your data is kept confidential within the AMP at all times and is only shared with staff when they need it to carry out their job.

We also process personal data pursuant to our legitimate interests in running our business such as:

Invoices and receipts
Accounts, VAT and tax returns

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Why do we collect information about you?

We may collect information about you because you are a patient or client of ours. You may be an associate or employee. You might be a claimant who is part of a legal or litigation claim.

We process the data because it is in our legitimate interests as a practitioner psychologist to do so. We need to see and analyse documents containing this information in order to provide our expert advice, to carry out an assessment or to deliver psychological intervention.

Another lawful reason for us processing your data may be Legal Obligation. If we are processing “special category data” about you, this is our second lawful reason to do so. This is likely to apply if you are being assessed as part of a litigation claim.

As a client or patient of AMP our lawful reason for processing “special category data” is that it is necessary for the purposes of the provision of health or social care or treatment.

If you are an employee or associate of AMP we will have a contract with you, which will be our lawful reason to process your data.

How long we retain your data

We take your privacy very seriously.

We are committed to taking reasonable steps to protect any individual identifying information that you provide to us. Once we receive your data, we make best efforts to ensure its security on our systems.

All personal information provided is stored in compliance with EU General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) rules.

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

Patients/Clients (Therapy or private assessment)

Personal data in legal cases is retained, where necessary, for six years in compliance with our professional indemnity obligations. Where this is not necessary, it is destroyed on the conclusion of the case.

Clients undertaking Court Reports

Job applicants, current and former AMP employees and associates

Personal information about unsuccessful job candidates will be held for 12 months after the recruitment exercise has been completed, it will then be destroyed or deleted. Once a person has taken up employment with AMP, we will compile a file relating to their employment. The information contained in this will be kept secure and will only be used for purposes directly relevant to that person’s employment.

Personal data relating to employees who have left our employment is retained for up to six years as necessary. This is the time limit for bringing a breach of contract claim. In some case we destroy it as soon as the employee leaves

What rights you have over your data

We are committed to protecting your rights to privacy. They include:

Right to be informed about what we do with your personal data
Right to have a copy of all the personal information we process about you
Right to rectification of any inaccurate data we process, and to add to the information we hold about you if it is incomplete
Right to be forgotten and your personal data destroyed
Right to restrict the processing of your personal data
Right to object to the processing we carry out based on our legitimate interest

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

AMP tries to be as open as it can be in terms of giving people access to their personal information. Individuals can find out if we hold any personal information by making a ‘subject access request’ or ‘Right of Access’ under the Data Protection Act and the General Data Protection Regulation. We will then supply to you:

A description of all data we hold about you
Inform you how it was obtained (if not supplied by you)
Inform you why, what purposes, we are holding it
What categories of personal data is concerned
Inform you who it could be disclosed to
Inform you of the retention periods of the data
Inform you around any automated decision making including profiling
Let you have a copy of the information in an intelligible electronic form unless otherwise requested.

To make a request to AMP for any personal information we may hold you need to put the request in writing. We want to make sure that your personal information is accurate and up to date. You may ask us to correct or remove information you think is inaccurate, please address these changes to the Information Security officer, via info@ascendingmindspsychology.com.

Clients undertaking Court Reports

If your concern is related to a case with a solicitor that we are working for, please refer the queries through them. We may not be able to comply with a request to correct information we hold about you where it pertains to a litigation claim – this would need to be discussed with your solicitor.

Where we send your data

Your information is kept confidential within the Company at all times and is only shared with staff when they need it to carry out their job. All staff are required to work to strict professional and contractual codes of confidentiality and where possible we will anonymise information so that individual patients cannot be identified.

If we become aware of your intent to cause harm to another person/organisation (e.g. terrorism), the law may require that we inform an authority without seeking your permission. In such a situation, the law may require that we share your personal information without your knowledge.
By contacting the Information Security Officer, by email and/or using the address below you can also get more details on:

agreements we have with other organisations for sharing information;
circumstances where we can pass on personal data without consent for example, to prevent and detect crime and to produce anonymised statistics;
our instructions to staff on how to collect, use and delete personal data; and
how we check that the information we hold is accurate and up to date

Special category data and personnel files held electronically are encrypted with restricted access. We do not collect or store special category or other personal data other than electronically – we do not hold this information as hard copies.

Patients/Clients (Therapy or private assessment)

In many circumstances we will not disclose personal data without consent.

Your information may be shared with outside organisations if they are directly involved in your care/case, for instance, your insurer if they are funding your treatment, your GP, or others involved in your care. We will discuss with you who we would discuss your care with, and what details we would share with them.

If your health is in jeopardy (with your agreement) we may share your contact information with an emergency healthcare service (e.g. Mental Health Crisis Team).

In many circumstances we will not disclose personal data without consent.

However, when we investigate a complaint we may need to share personal information with other relevant bodies.

If we do need to share your information, we will always try and ask for your permission for this. We may not be able to ask your permission under special circumstances where we are legally required to do so.

Clients undertaking Court Reports

We share personal data internally strictly on a need to know basis.

We do not share personal data with anyone external to the organisation, other than with:

Those who have instructed us as an expert witness
Outsourced service providers such as photocopying companies and digital dictation services, pursuant to GDPR compliant written contracts
With others pursuant to a court order

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Your contact information

Ascending Minds Psychology is the company that you are supplying your personal information to. The company Information Security Officer can be contacted by:

Email: info@ascendingmindspsychology.com

Additional information

How we protect your data

What data breach procedures we have in place

AMP tries to meet the highest standards when collecting and using personal information. For this reason, we take any complaints we receive about this very seriously. We encourage people to bring it to our attention if they think that our collection or use of information is unfair, misleading or inappropriate. We would also welcome any suggestions for improving our procedures. If you do have a complaint, contact the Data Protection Officer who will investigate the matter on your behalf.

If you are not satisfied with the response from AMP or believe we are not processing your personal data in accordance with the law you have the right to raise your complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)

Contact information ICO:
Website: https://ico.org.uk/concerns/
Email: casework@ico.org.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 303 123 1113