Privacy Policy
 

Your privacy is important to me and I will keep your personal information safe and secure and will only use it for the purpose it was given to me.  This Privacy Policy explains how Jo Woods Counselling uses and protects your information when you use this website, contact me via telephone, email and/or use my therapy services. 

Jo Woods Counselling is registered with the Information Commissioners Office:

How I use your information

Initial contact

If you make contact via the website or by phone/email, 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. 

While you are accessing counselling

If you then choose to pursue therapy with me, you will be offered an initial consultation. 

During this consultation I will collect personal information like: name, contact details, age, your GP contact details.

I may also collect more sensitive information (Special Category Data) during this initial consultation and this may include: your physical and mental health history, current physical and mental health symptoms, questionnaire responses and scores, relationship status and history, gender.

This information is collected to assess my suitability to provide you services and your suitability for the talking therapy service provided by Jo Woods Counselling.

Should we both agree that talking therapy is suitable for you, I will also ask you to complete and return my 'Counselling and Confidentiality Agreement' which details the terms and limitation of our relationship. Your agreement to this is required prior to the first full session. Your collected personal information, is used to help the counselling services run smoothly. These details are kept securely and are not shared with any third party.

I keep brief written notes of our sessions, these are anonymised and stored separately from other identifying information.

After counselling has ended

Once counselling has ended your records will be kept for five years from the end of our contact with each other and are then securely destroyed. If you would like me to delete your information sooner than this, please let me know.

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.  

Jo Woods 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 consultation, any stored contact information will be deleted. 

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.

You can read more about your rights at ico.org.uk/your-data-matters.

To make a request for any personal information I may hold about you, please put the request in writing addressing it to info@jowoodscounselling.co.uk.

Updated: April 2022