The Orchid Practice Ltd. Privacy Notice: Your Personal Information
Who’s responsible for your information?
Clinical Leads, Amy Drew and Marissa Webb are responsible for how we use and keep personal information at The Orchid Practice, Ltd.
Address: Unit 2, Suite 3, Stansted Courtyard, Parsonage Road, Takeley, Essex, CM22 6PU
E-mail: office@theorchidpractice.co.uk
Phone: 01279 506609
Why do we need personal information?: The Best Care
We need information about you and your child to provide you with the best therapy services we can. Not only do we need to keep in touch with you, we need to gather information about the child or young person in your care to work out what difficulties he or she is having as well as what else might be influencing the situation. We then need to monitor what happens to make sure the child or young person is making progress. We may also need to remember why we made the decisions we did, including who we made them with.
Legal obligation
Because our clients’ personal information is so important for delivering a good quality service, our governing body, the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) insists that speech and language therapists must keep records appropriately. The HCPC was set up according to law to regulate healthcare professions and therefore when practicing speech and language therapy we are legally obliged to keep information about you and your child.
What information do we need?
We will need information about you and the child who will be receiving speech and language therapy, as well as contact information for other relevant people, such as other professionals involved with the child (e.g. teachers, health visitors, doctors, case workers), if appropriate. This information is mostly written or typed notes, but sometimes we also make audio or video recordings, and includes: individual information, such as contact details, date of birth, developmental milestones, medical details, family relationships, educational progress, etc clinical information, such as assessment and progress details, information from other professionals, and what we see and think about behaviour, etc. Because speech and language therapists and occupational therapists, provide healthcare, including diagnosis and treatment, GDPR allows us to use and keep information about your child’s health (which it calls special category data because it is extra sensitive), as long as we uphold the HCPC’s standards of good practice.
Where do we get your information from?
We will ask you for the information we need to deliver good quality speech and language or occupational therapy for your child, as well as collect information when we watch and work with your child. We will also ask you about what other people are involved with your child, such as teachers, doctors and NHS therapists, and talk to them about your child. If we learn about someone else who could give us some useful information, we will discuss this with you before we contact them.
Who will we share it with?
When sharing information about you and your child with the other professionals you tell us about, we will only talk about information that is relevant to your child’s therapy provision. We will share information with the relevant staff at your child’s educational setting via our own record management system, MyTherapyTracker. We will also share your and your child’s personal information with other professionals with safeguarding responsibilities if we have concerns about your safety and/or the safety of your child.
Where do we keep personal information?
We keep personal information about you and your child electronically through MyTherapyTracker, our bespoke electronic record system. We use this to send reports, targets and session notes directly to your inbox. We store and share this information as securely as possible to maintain your confidentiality.
How long do we keep it for?
We will keep personal information about you and your child until your child is 25 years old, or 26 years if he or she was 17 years old when we stopped therapy. After this, the information will be destroyed securely.
Your rights
We must tell you if we are going to change the way we manage personal information as described in this handout. You can ask your therapist, to see your child’s complete electronic record at any time, which includes your and his or her personal information. You won’t be charged, unless you would like more than one copy. You can also have your therapist correct inaccurate or incomplete information. If we have passed this information on to someone else, we must tell them the correct information as soon as we can (at least a month after you’ve asked us to correct it). In certain circumstances, you can ask for your child’s notes to be restricted so that we are only allowed limited use of the information. This could be because you have concerns about whether the information we have for you or your child is correct or because of how we have used or managed the information.
You also have the right to complain, which is explained in our How to Feedback and Complain policy which is available on request. Any complaints or concerns should be discussed with the therapist or director. If unresolved, you can contact our regulatory bodies which are HCPC https://www.hcpc-uk.org/ and RCSLT https://www.rcslt.org/ or https://www.rcot.co.uk/ respectively.
Any questions?
Let us know if you have any questions or concerns and we would be glad to discuss how we keep and protect your information. We can also show you our additional policies, including our Record Keeping and Data Processing, and Safeguarding Policies on request.