Your privacy is very important to us 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 us.

We adhere to current data protection legislation, including the General Data Protection Regulation (EU/2016/679) (the GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003.

This privacy notice tells you what we will do with your personal information from the referral form and the information we collect after your therapy has ended with your independent counsellor, including:

  • Why we process your information and what purpose we are processing it for
  • Whether you have to provide it to us
  • How long we store it for
  • Whether there are other recipients of your personal information
  • Whether we intend to transfer it to another country
  • Whether we do automated decision-making or profiling, and
  • Your data protection rights

We are happy to chat through any questions you might have about our data protection policy and you can contact us via support@ehmf.org.uk

‘Data controller’ is the term used to describe the person/organisation that collects and stores and has responsibility for people’s personal data. In this instance, the data controller for funding purposes only is support@ehmf.org.uk.

Our contact email address is: support@ehmf.org.uk.

Our lawful basis for holding and using your personal information
The GDPR states that we must have a lawful basis for processing your personal data. There are different lawful bases depending on the stage at which we are processing your data. We have explained these below:

  • Information supplied by you on our referral form will be shared with your chosen BACP registered counsellor, or if not available, with a counsellor we have chosen. It may also be shared with a counsellor from the EHMF team for professional advice. The information supplied will also be used for statistical purposes to improve our service and further our cause. Your identity will not be revealed.
  • We will also ask you for feedback from your counselling and will use ‘legitimate interest’ as our lawful basis for holding and using your personal information. Your identity will not be revealed.
  • Your BACP counsellor will hold your counselling information and will have their own GDPR policy. They will inform EHMF when your counselling has started and ended as well as sessions attended or missed, for funding purposes only.

How we use your information

Initial contact.
When you contact us with an enquiry about counselling funding, we will collect information to help us satisfy your enquiry. This will be shared with your counsellor as advised above.

If you decide not to proceed with counselling funding, we will ensure all your personal data is deleted within 12 months. If you would like us to delete this information sooner, just let us know via email.

After counselling has ended.
Once counselling has ended your referral form data will be kept for 36 months from the end of our contact with each other and is then securely destroyed/deleted. If you want us to delete your information sooner than this, please tell us.

Third party recipients of personal data
We sometimes share statistical data with Health Care Providers, Funders and other bodies to further our cause. We may also use statistical information and feedback information to further our cause. Your personal data will always be anonymised and your identity will not be revealed.

Your rights
We try to be as open as we can in terms of giving people access to their personal information. You have a right to ask us to delete your personal information, to limit how we 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 we 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 we do hold information about you, we will:

  • give you a description of it and where it came from;
  • tell you why we are holding it, tell you how long we will store your data and how we 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 us at any time to correct any mistakes there may be in the personal information we hold about you.

To make a request for any personal information we may hold about you, please put the request in writing, addressing it to support@ehmf.org.uk.

If you have any complaint about how we handle your personal data please do not hesitate to get in touch with us by writing or emailing to the contact details given above. We would welcome any suggestions for improving our data protection procedures.

If you want to make a formal complaint about the way we have processed your personal information you can contact the ICO which is the statutory body that oversees data protection law in the UK. For more information go to ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.

Data security
We take the security of the data we hold about you very seriously and as such we take every effort to make sure it is kept secure. Information from your referral and feedback will be stored on a password protected file stored on a single computer with a back-up.

Additional information for website owners and employers

Visitors to our website
When someone visits the EHMF website, we use a third-party service, Google Analytics to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out information such as; the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. This information is only processed in a way that does not identify anyone. We do not make, and do not allow Google to make, any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website.

We use legitimate interests as our lawful basis for holding and using your personal information in this way when you visit our website.

We use Google Analytics so that I can continually improve our service. You can read Google’s privacy notice at: https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US.

We use WordPress as the content management system for our website – find out about WordPress and their data protection at: https://en-gb.wordpress.org/about/privacy/

Like most websites we use cookies to help the site work more efficiently – find out about our use of cookies at: https://en-gb.wordpress.org/about/privacy/cookies/

No user-specific data is collected by us or any third party. If you fill in a form on our website, that data will be temporarily stored on the web host before being sent to us.