Join Psychology Limited - Accessible Privacy Policy

Hello there!

This document is about how we use your information, how we look after your information when you come to us for therapy sessions or an assessment or when you visit our website.

You might want to read through this policy with an adult or someone who supports you, if you find it difficult to read or understand alone.

This is a young-person friendly/accessible summary of our privacy policy and complies with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) Age Appropriate Design Code, also known as the Children's Code. You can also read our full adult Privacy Policy if you wish.

About Us

We are Join Psychology Limited and we are the owners of the website you are using and the practice providing therapy or assessment services to you. We are in charge of keeping your information safe. The leader of Join Psychology Limited is Dr Jo Coombs. You can contact her if you have questions about these privacy rules on: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

What Is Privacy?

When we talk to you about your privacy, we are talking about information about you and what we do with it.

Parental Consent

If you’re under 13 years old, your parents must say it’s ok for us to collect your data. If you’re over 13 and we believe you’re able to give consent, then you can give your own consent. If you’re using our services and are 16 or 17 and we believe you’re able to give consent to our services, you can consent, but a parent or legal guardian must enter into the legal agreement with our service.

What If You’re Not Happy With Us?

A government body called the Information Commissioner’s Office (‘ICO’) makes sure we follow all the rules. If you don’t think we are following the rules, you can speak to them. To do this, you can find their details on the internet and contact them. Although, we’d be happy to hear from you before you speak to them.

We have a person called a Data Protection Officer who also makes sure we follow the rules for personal data. To speak to them, they can be contacted by:

Dr Jo Coombs – This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

What Is Personal Data?

This is any information about you. It could be things like your name, birthday, where you live as well as more personal, detailed information.

What Data We Collect About You?

We promise to only collect data about you that we need to provide our therapy sessions and assessments and to make our website work properly. Some examples of the data we might collect about you are:

Personal information such as first and last name, your username, title, birthday and gender.
Contact details such as your parent’s address, email address and telephone number.
Information about your computer use such as your computer's address (IP address), when you log in, what kind of web browser you use, its version, any extra features in your browser, the time zone you're in, where you are, what system your computer uses, and other tech details about the devices you use to visit our website.
Data from your profile like information about what you’ve bought, your favourite things on our site, any feedback you’ve gave us, and replies to any surveys.
Information about how you use our website.

We collect health data about you during our therapy and assessment sessions, so we can help you. We will always ask you if this is ok before doing this.

When Do We Collect Your Personal Data?

Remember, if you are under 13, your parents must give us permission to collect your data. If you’re over 13, you need to give us permission to collect your data. Here are some examples:

Directly - you may give us your data when you or a parent/guardian/supporter fills in one of our forms, when you talk to us in person during one of our sessions or if you contact us by email.
Other people - sometimes we might get information about you from others like your school or your General Practitioner (GP).
Our website - when you are on our website, we might collect technical data about your phone or laptop, and how you like to surf the internet.We collect this by using cookies, which are bits of information websites attach to a phone, tablet or computer, not biscuits! Different cookies do different things. Some make our website work. Others tell us how people like you use our website. Some remember what you like and your uses on our website.

We collect these cookies because they are needed for the running of our site. They help us make our website better. You can say no to these cookies if you want to. Please ask an adult for help with this, as we have instructions on how to do this on our adult Cookie Policy. Beware though – blocking cookies on our website will stop you being able to see all the cool features!

We might need to collect your data because the law says so, or because of an agreement we have with you. If you don’t provide this, we might not be able to carry out our side of the agreement.

Why Do We Collect Your Personal Data?

We collect your personal data so we can:

Register you as a new client and to provide our therapy services or carry out one of our assessments for you.
To keep in touch with you – for example if we need to tell you about an update to this policy.
To run our practice and make sure our website works for you, and to give you relevant website content.
To improve our website and by looking at good and bad parts of yours and other customers data together.
To show you things that we think you might like.

Sometimes, we will ask you if it is ok to collect this personal data beforehand, especially if the data is sensitive. Most importantly, we always work to keep your personal data safe. This makes it less likely that your data will be accidentally lost, used, changed or seen when it shouldn’t be.

How Do We Use Your Personal Data?

We only collect your data when the law says it is ok to. Here are some examples:

Where we need your data to make our website the best it can be so we can give you the best experience.
Where your information has to be shared for a good reason for our or other’s business
Where the law says we need to.

Sometimes, we might think that we need to use your personal data for another reason than we collected it. This doesn’t happen a lot, but if it does, we will tell you and explain why, unless we are told to do this without telling you by the law.

Do We Ever Share Your Personal Data?

Sometimes we might need to share your personal data, but only when the law says we have to do this, or only when we have a really good reason to do so. Some examples are:

Businesses we work with that help us deliver our great website to you.
Other healthcare professionals that help us provide our therapy services to you.
Professional services and technology providers, so they can help us run our business.
Services which provide test materials which we use in therapy and assessments.

Anyone we do share your data with has to keep it safe and follow the law. They also are not allowed to use your personal data for any other reason than the reason they have been given it. We may also share aggregated data – which is data that we can’t tell is yours because it doesn’t have your personal details attached. On our website, you might see links to other websites. If you click on these links, this might let other people collect or share your personal data. We are not in control of these links.

Do We Ever Transfer Your Data to Different Countries?

Sometimes, we might share your data outside of the United Kingdom. Don’t worry, we always make sure your data is protected. We share your data outside of our country because some of the services we work with have workers or data centres outside of the United Kingdom.

We will only share your data to countries that the United Kingdom agree are safe. With certain people we work with, we might use a contract which is approved by the ICO (that company we mentioned that make sure we follow the rules) and other regulators to make sure your data is protected.

How Long Will You Keep My Personal Data?

We only keep your data for as long as we need it to provide our therapy or assessment services to you, or for other reasons like legal, accounting or reporting rules we need to follow. Usually, we keep your data for:

For people aged 18+ - we keep your data for 7 years after your last contact with our service.
For people aged 16 and 17 – we keep your data until you’re 25 years old.

We make sure your data is kept safely and we have security measures in place to protect it. Our security measures involve using multi-factor authentication for our cloud-based email and information storage systems. Any confidential paperwork is locked in a filing cabinet and then shredded using a secure shredding company after we have saved it to our secure cloud storage system.

What Are My Rights?

You have rights under data protection laws. You can always ask us:

To see a copy of the information we have about you.
To change the information we have about you.
To delete the information we have about you.
To not use your personal data.
To ask us only to use your personal data in a certain way.
To move your data to somebody else.

If you want to ask us to do something with your personal data, then please ask a grown-up who can contact us for you. There are more instructions for them to follow in our adult Privacy Policy.