Join Psychology Limited - Accessible Service Terms and Conditions

Hello there!

This document talks about the rules for our work with you, whether that’s therapy or assessment. This is an accessible version of our Service Terms and Conditions which is suitable for young people and those who need or prefer more accessible information.

We are Join Psychology Limited, and Dr Jo Coombs is the leader of this service. Sometimes, when we talk about Join Psychology Limited, we might also call this “the Practice” or “We” or refer to “Our”. Our address is Wyvols Court, Basingstoke Road, Swallowfield, Berkshire, RG7 1WY.

Please take your time to read these rules carefully. If you don’t understand something, please ask us, and we will help you to understand.

Please note, this is a young-person friendly/accessible summary of our full Service Terms and Conditions which complies with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) Age Appropriate Design Code, also known as the Children's Code. If you are a parent or carer looking for the full policy, please let us know and we can provide this to you.

Professional Information

Dr Jo Coombs and all our other healthcare staff follow important rules set by the UK’s Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and other professional organisations that set the rules for how professionals work. You can learn more about them by going to this website: www.hcpc-uk.org. The help that the clinical psychologists in this service give you always follows the HCPC rules. Our other healthcare professionals will also follow the rules of their professional body.

Our Clinical Psychologists are also part of the British Psychological Society (BPS) and follow their rules too. You can learn more about these rules at these websites:

https://www.bps.org.uk

Consent to Services

Before we start our work together, it's important that you understand what we will be doing and feel comfortable. If you are old enough and understand enough about therapy or autism and/or ADHD assessment, you can give your own consent to start. We will make sure to explain everything to you in a way that you understand and answer any questions you have.

Understanding What We Will Help You With: If you’re seeing us for therapy, we will meeting to you about what therapy is, what we will do, and how it might help you. If we are seeing you for assessment, we will tell you about the process and how it might help you. If you have any questions, please ask us at any time.
Making Your Decision: You can decide if you want to start therapy and/or complete an autism and/or ADHD assessment with us. If you are unsure, you can talk to your parent or guardian and/or ask us more questions.
Your Rights: You have the right to say yes or no to therapy and/or to autism and/or ADHD assessment. If you say yes and then change your mind, that is okay too.
Confidentiality: What you tell us in therapy and/or autism and/or ADHD assessment sessions is private. We will not share it with anyone unless you or someone else is in danger, or if the law says we have to. We will share the information from autism and/or ADHD assessments in a written report with you. You decide who else (if anyone) gets a copy of the report.
Involvement of Parents/Guardians: We will meeting with you about how much your parents or guardians will be involved. It's important that you feel comfortable with what we share with them.
Reviewing Consent: We will check in with you regularly to make sure you are still happy to continue with therapy and understand everything.

We’ve sent you an online form which asks you to share some personal details and also agree for us to gather and use health information so that we can do our job with you. Please complete the registration and consent form we sent you after you’ve read these Service Terms and Conditions and also our accessible Privacy Policy.

Neurodevelopmental and Psychological Assessments

The cost of assessments is in our current price list and includes the meetings, feedback session and full written report. We ask that assessments are paid for at the time of booking. Once an assessment has started, we cannot offer a full or partial refund if you cancel the assessment.

Our assessments are very detailed. We get information from different places, such as interviews, questionnaires, specialised tests, and observation. The assessment process typically includes an initial consultation, followed by appointments where standardised tests and clinical interviews are completed with you and people who know you well.

It’s really important that you don’t use any substances, including alcohol, recreational drugs, or non-prescribed medications, before completing any part of the assessment. Substances like these can have a bad effect on the test results and might lead to inaccurate outcomes. If we believe or find out that you’ve taken substances before an assessment, the test will need to be repeated at another time. We will have to charge you again for this part of the assessment.

In our assessments, we may use online assessment questionnaire providers to collect health data. We need your consent for us to use these third-party organisations to gather and process your health information. By giving your consent, you show you are aware and agree that these providers may collect, use, and store your data in line with their privacy policies and practices. Following the assessment, a detailed report will be provided, summarising the findings and any diagnosis made. This report will include recommendations for treatment or management strategies if a condition is diagnosed.

It is important to understand that not all assessments result in a diagnosis. After the assessment, follow-up appointments can be arranged to discuss the results in detail and explore treatment options. These appointments are charged separately.

We do not have any responsibility for prescribing or managing medication. You can either see your General Practitioner (GP) about medication or I can make a suggestion for a service that might be able to help with medication if an ADHD diagnosis is made. It is important you know that the outcome of our assessment does not guarantee that medication will be offered to or suitable for you. You will need to consult with your GP, Psychiatrist or other suitably qualified health professional for any decisions related to medication.

We do not offer refunds if a local authority, educational institution, or any other third-party refuses to accept a diagnostic assessment report provided by us. Our assessments and reports are conducted and prepared in line with professional standards and guidelines. However, we cannot guarantee acceptance by external bodies, which may have their own criteria and policies for recognising diagnostic assessment reports. We recommend discussing specific requirements with the relevant third party prior to starting the assessment process with us.

Meetings

Our meetings together will be by appointment only. How long our meeting will be, what time it will be at, and how much our meeting will cost will be sent to you and, if you agree, your parent or guardian before our meeting.
Our first meeting can be booked by your parent or guardian by writing to us via an email, or phoning us.
Our meetings after this can be made during our appointments, or by email or phone.
If you are going to be late, please tell us.

If you are later than 15 minutes, we will try to do our meeting, but we might not be able to. This means, your appointment might be cancelled, and your parents or guardians will still need to pay us.

Online Appointments

We might talk to you on things like Zoom, Teams, WhatsApp or Skype.
When we use someone else to help with our online meetings, like Zoom, we’ll keep your information safe, just like we promise to in our privacy rules. But sometimes, those helpers, like Zoom, might have their own rules. We make sure we read their rules too, so you know your information is safe.
We’ll try our best to start our online meeting, or livestream, on time, but sometimes things happen that we can’t control. If we have to wait a bit, we’re sorry, it’s not our fault!
Sometimes, we might need to stop our online meeting for a little while. This could be because of a problem with our computers or because something unexpected happens.
If we have to stop our online meeting because of something, we will try to tell you as soon as we can.
Before our online meeting, please find a place where you have really good internet connection, and that is not noisy. It is important that you are in a private space so that you can chat to us confidentiality.Equally, you are welcome to have a parent, guardian or supporter sit with you if you prefer.
It might help it you wear headphones to stop noise from bothering you, and to keep our meeting private.

Recording Our Meetings

Sometimes, we need to record our meetings to learn and get better at our work. We will ask you if this is okay with you. If you don’t want us to, that is okay too. We won’t record the meeting unless you say it’s ok.
Please let us know if you would like to record the session yourself, for your own purposes.Usually that’s okay, but you need to ask us first. You can’t record our meetings without us saying this is okay. This means any type of recording, like using your phone or video chat apps.
If we do record our meeting, you can’t share it with anyone else without us saying that’s okay. if you want to share it with someone, please talk to us first. If we say this is okay, you are not allowed to share this recording with anyone else other than who we agreed, or put this on social media.

Payment

We will send an invoice for your therapy session(s) to the person who has agreed to pay for them after we meet. Payment for autism, ADHD and psychological assessments has to be made before we meet with you. If we have to chase you/the person paying for payment of invoices, we will charge interest of 8% above the Bank of England base rate from the date the payment was due until it was paid. We might stop your appointments until the invoices are paid.

Cancellations

If you want to cancel our meeting, please tell us at least two working days before. A working day is any day between (and including) Monday – Friday. We will give your parent or guardian their money back for this meeting if they have paid for it in advance. For example, if you have a meeting with us booked on Tuesday, tell us the Friday before.If you cancel less than a day before our meeting, your parent or guardian will have to pay for the meeting anyway.
If you cancel between one and two days before, your parent/guardian will have to pay the full price of our meeting.
If you can’t come in person, we may be able to have our meeting on the phone or online.
If you cancel your meeting with us less than two days before, or don’t show up, this might count as one of your appointments if your parent or guardian is using a health insurance policy. Ask your parent or guardian to check with their health insurance company about this.
We might cancel your meeting at any time if we don’t have the right people or things to help you, or something happens that we can’t control. We will give you your money back in full if we have to cancel.
We will try to start your meeting on time, but sometimes we might be late because of other people we are talking to, or something else. If we’re more than 30 minutes late, you can cancel and your parent or guardian will get their money back.
If something happens, that is your fault, or something outside of our control, that stops us from doing our job, we won’t be responsible for any problems you have.

Face to Face Meetings

If our meeting happens in a place that we don’t own, you have to follow the property owner’s rules. This includes rules for fire safety and staying safe.
You are in charge of your own stuff when you come to our meetings. We will not be responsible if you lose something, or if it gets broken.

Keeping Your Details Private

What we meeting about in our meetings is private. We want you to feel safe sharing your feelings and thoughts.
We will keep your information private, no matter who pays for our meetings.
We won’t tell anyone else about what you tell us, except in a few special cases.
We might tell other people if we think you or someone else is in danger, or the law says we need to share your information. We will try to talk to you about this first. We might also share your information with other people that work with us who need to know your information so we can help you.
We won’t use your information for anything else except to help you.
We will make sure that anyone we tell your information to, promises to keep it private.

Sometimes, our helpers need to talk to other helpers about their work to learn and get better. Your information will be kept private, and your detailed personal information will be removed so no one will know we’re talking about you. This won’t be shared with anyone else.

How We Use Your Information and Keep It Safe

We’ll only use your information the way we promise to in our privacy rules. We have also sent you a copy of our privacy rules to read. Please ask to see them if you don’t have them.
We have an accessible version of our privacy rules which we will share with you either before or during our first meet up.
We are registered with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) just like the rules say we should be.
The ICO is part of the UK government and they make sure practices like ours comply with the UK rules and laws about protecting people’s personal information.

Writing Things Down

We’ll write down digital notes from our meetings and keep them safe. We will also keep a copy of your contact detailsand other personal information you’ve shared with us so we can do our job to help you.
Notes are saved on a computer that is protected by a password. We protect these systems with extra security, like multi-factor authentication.
We don’t keep any paper copies of our notes. If we use paper in our therapy or assessments, we keep them locked in a filing cabinet and then scan and upload them to our safe online record system. We then shred the paper copies using a secure shredding service.
We own the notes but we are happy to talk to you about them. You are allowed to see them if you ask.
It very rare cases, the courts might ask to see the notes, but we would let you know about this first.

If we need to send emails with details about your care, for example to your doctor, we will make sure the information is password protection. The password will be sent separately. Alternatively, we might use a very secure email system or otherwise password protect documents which has information about you in it. You should do this too if you send us detailed information.

Your Doctor (General Practitioner – GP)

We will ask you if you’d like information about your work with us and progress to be shared with your GP.
It can be helpful to tell your doctor about any help you’re having, including therapy and new diagnoses.
Your parent or guardian should give us your doctor’s name and address, and the name and contact information of who can help you in an emergency.
If someone asks us for information about you, we won’t tell them anything without you saying this is okay, unless we have to by law.

What We Are and Are Not Responsible For

We’re responsible for any problems that happen because we don’t do our job right or we make a mistake. We won’t be responsible if these problems were very hard to predict.
We only help you for your own personal use. We are not responsible for any money you or your parent or guardian lose, or any problems their business (if they have one) has.
Your wellbeing is really important to us, but we are responsible if we hurt you or do something wrong on purpose – which is highly unlikely, but we have to tell you this here.
If you need more information, you can ask your parent or guardian to speak to your local Citizens’ Advice Bureau or Trading Standards Office.
Although we will try our very best, we can’t promise that our help will work or be right for you.

If You Are Not Happy With Us

We want to help you in the best way we can. But, if you’re not happy with something, please tell us. You can contact Dr Jo Coombs on: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
If you want to talk to someone else because you think we have been unprofessional and you can’t talk to us about it, you can speak to the British Psychological Society, or the Health and Care Professions Council. Here are the links for their websites:
- https://www.bps.org.uk/submitting-complaint
- https://www.hcpc-uk.org/concerns/raising-concerns/

Emergencies

The type of work we do doesn’t help with emergencies. If you need help right away, please meeting to your doctor, call 111 or 999, or go to the hospital. You can also call the Samaritans on 116 123 or Childline on 0800 1111.

If We Are Going To Be Away

We’ll tell you if your therapist/clinician is going to be away. If you’re going to be away, please tell us as soon as possible if it affects your meetings with us.

Other Things

We can stop our help if we think it’s not good for you.
We won’t do anything that is against the law or any rules.
If you are sick, we won’t meet in person. We can talk online or on the phone instead.
If you have a question about your appointment, you can contact Dr Jo Coombs on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
If you need to talk to us before we meet, please email or call us. We can’t provide help outside of our usual meeting times, which are Monday – Friday, 10:00am – 17:00pm. We will try to answer your emails or calls within 3 working days.
We have to give you some information before we start working together. This information is in these rules, or will be given before you book a meeting with us. This information is part of our agreement.
If you have any questions about these rules, ask us!