Privacy Policy
We want everyone who contacts Birth and Beyond to feel confident and comfortable with how any personal information you share with us will be looked after or used. This Privacy Policy sets out how we collect, use and store your personal information (this means any information that identifies or could identify you).
The Birth and Beyond Privacy Policy may change so please remember to check back from time to time. This is version 1 and was last updated on 22nd May 2018. Where we have made any changes to this Privacy Policy, we will make this clear on our website or contact you about any changes.
1. Who we are
2. How we collect information about you
4. Legal basis for using your information
5. Marketing
6. Sharing your Information
7. Keeping your information safe
8. How long we hold your information for
9. Your rights
1. Who we are
At Birth and Beyond, we are committed to protecting your personal information and making every effort to ensure that your personal information is processed in a fair, open and transparent manner.
Birth and Beyond is a "data controller" for the purposes of the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 ("Data Protection Law"). This means that we are responsible for, and control the processing of, your personal information.
For further information about our privacy practices, please contact us at sarah@birthandbeyond.com
2. How we collect information about you
Everything we do, we do to try and help people who get in touch with Birth and Beyond get both support and respect. We want to make sure you receive the communications that are most relevant to you, be it through visiting our website or receiving emails, post or phone calls. We want to make sure you receive the best attention when you send us an enquiry or come for counselling.
We collect information from you in the following ways:
When you interact with us directly: This could be if you ask us about our services, participate in online support groups, ask a question about mental health, or otherwise provide us with your personal information. This includes when you phone us, email us, contact us via social media, send us videos or get in touch in person.
When you visit our website: We gather general information which might include which pages you visit most often and which services, events or information is of most interest to you. We may also track which pages you visit when you click on links in emails from us or from our website.
We use this information to personalise the way our website is presented when you visit to make improvements and to ensure we provide the best service and experience for you. Wherever possible we use anonymous information which does not identify individual visitors to our website.
When you interact with us through third parties: This could be if one of the other third parties that we work with and provide your consent for your personal information to be shared with us, such as from events run by other organisations.
3. Information we collect and why we use it
Personal Information
At Birth and Beyond we try to restrict the amount of personal information we collect about you as much as possible, but in the course of answering enquiries and providing services we do collect limited amounts of data.
Personal information we collect includes details such as your name, telephone number and email address, as well as information you provide in any communications between us. People who come for counselling will also be asked to give their GP Surgery name and telephone number.
You will have given us this information whilst submitting an enquiry, joining an online support group, signing up for emails, coming for counselling or any of the other ways to interact with us.
We will mainly use this information:
· To respond to enquiries or other communications you have sent us
· To update you with important administrative messages about groups/services, or events as necessary
· To provide face-to-face and online support.
· To keep a record of your relationship/contact with us.
If you do not provide this information, we will not be able to answer your enquiry, update you with service information, or provide online support.
Sensitive Personal Information
If you share your personal experience or the experiences of a friend or relative, we may also collect this health information. Brief written notes are held about every person who comes for counselling with Birth and Beyond, to help keep continuity between sessions. If you provide us with any Sensitive Personal Information by telephone, social media, email or by other means, we will treat that information with extra care and confidentiality and always in accordance with this Privacy Policy.
If you would like us to share your story with the media or other parties as part of our work raising awareness about perinatal mental health (for example, on our blog), we will obtain your explicit consent for this.
A special note about the Sensitive Personal Information we hold
Data Protection Law recognises that some categories of personal information are more sensitive. Sensitive Personal Information can include information about a person’s health, race, ethnic origin, political opinions, sex life, sexual orientation or religious beliefs.
If you contact us via email or social media, you may choose to provide details of a sensitive nature.
We will only use this information:
· For the purposes of dealing with your enquiry and quality monitoring or evaluating the services we provide, including taking our work to clinical supervision.
· For the purpose of providing counselling services either face-to-face or online, or for Video Interaction Guidance.
· Where you have given us your express consent or otherwise clearly indicated to us that you are happy for us to share your story, then we may publish it on our blog or in other media.
We will not pass on your details to anyone else without your express permission except in exceptional circumstances. Examples of this might include anyone reporting serious self-harm or posing a threat to others or children contacting us and sharing serious issues such as physical abuse or exploitation. Wherever possible in these situations, we would support you to share information with relevant authorities yourself rather than sharing information ourselves without your knowledge, however if we were to share knowledge with relevant authorities, we would let you know we were going to do so first.
4. Legal basis for using your information
In some cases, we will only use your personal information where we have your consent.
However, there are other lawful reasons that allow us to process your personal information and one of those is called 'legitimate interests'. This means that the reason that we are processing information is because there is a legitimate interest for Birth and Beyond to process your information to help us to provide support for people with mental health issues.
Whenever we process your Personal Information under the ‘legitimate interest' lawful basis we make sure that we take into account your rights and interests and will not process your personal information if we feel that there is an imbalance.
Some examples of where we have a legitimate interest to process your Personal information are where we respond to your enquiry or update you about services you access.
If you share any personal information that is classed as ‘sensitive’ under data protection law, such as information about your health, and it is not practical to ask for your explicit consent to access it (for example, if you send us an email which contains details about how you are feeling) we will retain this as part of our commitment to providing support and counselling services. There is a public interest exemption for this purpose as part of the Data Protection Act 2018.
5. Marketing
We will only contact you about our work and information about Birth and Beyond by email if you have agreed for us to contact you in this manner. We will not contact you via phone or text message for marketing purposes.
You can update your choices or stop us sending you these communications at any time by contacting 'sarah@birthandbeyond.com’ or by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the relevant communication.
6. Sharing your Information
The personal information we collect about you will be used by Sarah Wheatley to help support you, or provide services to support others.
We will never sell or share your personal information with organisations so that they can contact you directly for any marketing activities.
Birth and Beyond may however share your information with our trusted partners and suppliers (such as Freeagent and Mailchimp) who provide accountancy and emailing services, but processing of this information is always carried out under our instruction. We make sure that they store the data securely, delete it when they no longer need it and never use it for any other purposes. We enter into contracts with these service providers that require them to comply with Data Protection Laws and ensure that they have appropriate controls in place to secure your information.
Birth and Beyond is a small organisation and so we use TSO Host’s email services rather than having our own computer servers. We also make use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Linked In. The companies we use are committed to abiding by EU data protection law. If this situation were to change, Birth and Beyond will re-evaluate its use of them.
This website uses the Facebook pixel to collect data on visitor behaviour, such as which pages are visited, which device was used to view the website, what actions were taken. This information is held directly by Facebook, not by Birth and Beyond.
Legal disclosure
We may disclose your information if required to do so by law (for example, to comply with applicable laws, regulations and codes of practice or in response to a valid request from a competent authority); or, in order to enforce our conditions of sale and other agreements.
7. Keeping your information safe
We take looking after your information very seriously. We've implemented appropriate physical, technical and organisational measures to protect the personal information we have under our control, both on and off-line, from improper access, use, alteration, destruction and loss.
Unfortunately the transmission of information using the internet is not completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information sent to us this way, we cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted to us online.
Our websites may contain links to other sites. While we try to link only to sites that share our high standards and respect for privacy, we are not responsible for the content or the privacy practices employed by other sites. Please be aware that advertisers or Web sites that have links on our site may collect personally identifiable information about you. This privacy statement does not cover the information practices of those websites.
For example, Birth and Beyond is also a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.co.uk.
8. How long we hold your information for
We only keep it as long as is reasonable and necessary for the relevant activity. If you would like to know more about our standard time periods for holding any personal information, please contact us at sarah@birthandbeyond.com
If at any point you would like Birth and Beyond to stop holding or processing any information about you (for example, to delete all emails we hold from you) at any time then you can contact us at the address above and we will comply with the request as much as is practical with reference to our legitimate interests for holding data.
9. Your rights
You have various rights in respect of the personal information we hold about you – these are set out in more detail below. If you wish to exercise any of these rights or make a complaint, you can do so by contacting us at sarah@birthandbeyond.com . You can also make a complaint to the data protection supervisory authority, the Information Commissioner's Office, https://ico.org.uk/
· Access to your personal information: You have the right to request access to a copy of the personal information that we hold about you, along with information on what personal information we use, why we use it, who we share it with, how long we keep it for and whether it has been used for any automated decision making. You can make a request for access free of charge. Please make all requests for access in writing, and provide us with evidence of your identity.
· Right to object: You can object to our processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes. Please contact us as noted above, providing details of your objection.
· Consent: If you have given us your consent to use personal information (for example, to be published on our blog), you can withdraw your consent at any time.
· Rectification: You can ask us to change or complete any inaccurate or incomplete personal information held about you.
· Erasure: You can ask us to delete your personal information where it is no longer necessary for us to use it, you have withdrawn consent, or where we have no lawful basis for keeping it.
· Portability: You can ask us to provide you or a third party with some of the personal information that we hold about you in a structured, commonly used, electronic form, so it can be easily transferred.
· Restriction: You can ask us to restrict the personal information we use about you where you have asked for it to be erased or where you have objected to our use of it.
· No automated-decision making: Automated decision-making takes place when an electronic system uses personal information to make a decision without human intervention. You have the right not to be subject to automated decisions that will create legal effects or have a similar significant impact on you, unless you have given us your consent, it is necessary for a contract between you and us or is otherwise permitted by law. You also have certain rights to challenge decisions made about you. We do not currently carry out any automated decision-making.
Please note, some of these rights only apply in certain circumstances and we may not be able to fulfil every request.