Introduction
In order to provide you with the best service possible I need to hold your personal contact details and records of your therapy sessions. This privacy notice tells you what I will do with your personal information from initial point of contact through to after therapy has ended.
Your privacy is very important, and you can be confident that your personal information will be kept safe and secure and will only be used for the purpose it was given to me. I adhere to current data protection legislation, including the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. I also adhere to the ethical guidelines regarding protecting client privacy and confidentiality set by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).
My lawful basis for holding and using your personal information
GDPR states that I must have a lawful basis for processing your personal data. There are different lawful bases depending on the stage at which I am processing your data. I have explained these below: If you have had therapy with me and it has now ended, I will use legitimate interest as my lawful basis for holding and using your personal information. If you are currently having therapy or if you are in contact with me to consider therapy, I will process your personal data where it is necessary for the performance of our contract. The GDPR also makes sure that I look after any sensitive personal information that you may disclose to me appropriately. This type of information is called ‘special category personal information’. The lawful basis for me processing any special categories of personal information is that it is for provision of health treatment (in this case counselling) and necessary for a contract with a health professional (in this case, a contract between me and you).
How I use your information
Initial contact. When you contact me with an enquiry about my counselling services, I will collect information to help me satisfy your enquiry. This will include your name so that I can book the appointment into my calendar, and also a contact method, for example an email address so the teams invite for the session can be sent to you, and phone number so you can be contacted in cases of telephone consultations, internet outage, and so that you could be informed if I was unable to attend an appointment due to unforeseen circumstances. Alternatively, your GP or other health professional, parent or trusted individual may send me your details when making a referral or an enquiry on your behalf. If you decide not to proceed, I will ensure all your personal data is deleted within one month. If you would like me to delete this information sooner, just let me know.
While you are accessing counselling. Rest assured that everything you discuss with me is confidential. Confidentiality means your personal information will not be shared with any third party unless confidentiality needs to be broken and this will only be broken in cases of legal reasons such as acts of terrorism, drug trafficking, and money laundering, or any situations where I feel you or others are at serious risk of harm. I will always try to speak to you about this first, unless there are safeguarding issues that prevent this. I will keep a record of your personal details to help the counselling services run smoothly. These details are kept securely using Microsoft 365 Services specifically their cloud storage service, meaning there are no physical copies of your information anywhere, the cloud storage is password protected and needs two factor authentication to be able to gain access. I will keep written notes of each session, these are kept on Microsoft 365’s OneDrive cloud storage. For security reasons I do not retain text messages for more than one month. If there is relevant information contained in a text message, I will put this information into the counselling notes before deleting. Likewise, any email correspondence will be deleted after one month if it is not important. If necessary, I will retain the email for longer, or I will put this information into the counselling notes before deleting.
After counselling has ended. Once counselling has ended your records will be kept for seven years on Microsoft 365’s One Drive cloud storage from the end of our contact with each other and are then securely destroyed. If you want me to delete your information sooner than this, please tell me
Third party recipients of personal data
I sometimes share personal data with third parties, for example, where I have contracted with a supplier to carry out specific tasks. In such cases I have carefully selected which partners I work with. I take great care to ensure that I have a contract with the third party that states what they are allowed to do with the data I share with them. I ensure that they do not use your information in any way other than the task for which they have been contracted.
Possible External Recipients: HMRC, ICO, Microsoft 365, Squarespace.
Your rights
I try to be as open as I can be in terms of giving people access to their personal information. You have a right to ask me to delete your personal information, to limit how I use your personal information, or to stop processing your personal information. You also have a right to ask for a copy of any information that I hold about you and to object to the use of your personal data in some circumstances. You can read more about your rights at ico.org.uk/your-data-matters. If I do hold information about you I will: give you a description of it and where it came from; tell you why I am holding its, tell you how long I will store your data and how I made this decision; tell you who it could be disclosed to; let you have a copy of the information in an intelligible form. You can also ask me at any time to correct any mistakes there may be in the personal information I hold about you. To make a request for any personal information I may hold about you, please put the request in writing addressing it to victoria@vlion.co.uk. If you have any complaint about how I handle your personal data, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me by writing or emailing the contact details given above. I would welcome any suggestions for improving my data protection procedures. If you want to make a formal complaint about the way I have processed your personal information you can contact the ICO which is the statutory body that oversees data protection law in the UK.
Data security
I take the security of the data I hold about you very seriously and as such I take every effort to make sure it is kept secure. I use third party Microsoft 365 Businesses services to help store any data I hold about you in a secure way. All services I use such as Microsoft Outlook for email, Microsoft Word for client documents, Microsoft Bookings to book initial consultations are password protected and need two factor authentication to be able to access the data. The data collected is stored in Microsoft OneDrive, their cloud storage service, meaning there are no physical copies of your information anywhere, the cloud storage is password protected and needs two factor authentication to be able to gain access. You can read Microsoft 365’s privacy policy here; Microsoft Privacy Statement – Microsoft privacy. I use Microsoft teams for remote client sessions, individual meeting links will be sent to you meaning no one else can gain access to your session and I will need to grant anyone access into the session, sessions will not be recorded by either you or I unless agreed upon in advance and a separate contracted signed. As a cloud-based service Microsoft Teams processes various types of personal data as part of delivering the service. You can read Microsoft Teams privacy policy here; Microsoft Teams Privacy - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn.
Website Visitors
I use a third party website hosting service, Squarespace, who collects personal data when you visit this website, including: Information about your browser, network and device. Web pages you visited prior to coming to this website. Web pages you view while on this website. Your IP address. Squarespace needs the data to run this website, and to protect and improve its platform and services. Squarespace analyses the data in a de-personalized form.
When you submit information to this website via webform contact me button, I collect the data requested in the webform in order to track and respond to your submissions. We share this information with Squarespace, our online store hosting provider, so that they can provide website services to us. I also share this information with Microsoft 365 services above for storage and with Zapier for data porting.
This website uses cookies and similar technologies, which are small files or pieces of text that download to a device when a visitor accesses a website or app. For information about viewing the cookies dropped on your device, visit The cookies Squarespace uses.
Squarespace use’s Squarespace Analytics which collects personal data to power our site analytics, including: Information about your browser, network, and device, Web pages you visited prior to coming to this website, Your IP address. This information may also include details about your use of this website, including: Clicks, Internal links, Pages visited, Scrolling, Searches, Timestamps. We share this information with Squarespace, our website analytics provider, to learn about site traffic and activity.
I use Google Analytics so that I can continually improve my service to you. You can read Google Analytics privacy notice here Privacy Policy – Privacy & Terms – Google. I use Squarespace as the content management system for my website, like most websites it uses cookies to help the site work more efficiently - find out about Squarespace and data protection here Privacy Policy – Squarespace. No user-specific data is collected by me or any third party. If you fill in a form on my website, that data will be temporarily stored on the web host before being sent to me.