Initial contact. When you contact me with an enquiry about my counselling services, I will collect information to help me satisfy your enquiry. This will include your name and a contact method, for example an email address or phone number. If an enquiry is made and you decide not to proceed, I will ensure that all your personal data is deleted within one month. If you would like me to delete this information sooner, please let me know.
While you are accessing counselling. Rest assured that everything you discuss with me is confidential. That confidentiality will only be broken if there are legal or ethical obligations to disclose, for example, if you disclose something that implies serious harm to yourself or others, or if a court of law requires me to disclose information. I will always try to speak to you about this first, unless there are safeguarding issues that prevent this.
Counsellors are required to have regular supervision support so I may discuss our work with my supervisor. In these instances, you will remain anonymous. I keep brief notes of our therapy sessions for the purpose of assisting our work together. The notes help me to keep track of the issues that we are working on, and they are for my use only. The notes do not include any personal details that could be used to identify you and they are stored securely like your personal information.
I will keep a record of your personal details and notes of our sessions to help the counselling services run smoothly. These details are kept securely stored in a password secured folder in my computer, which is also locked with a personal sign in password and are not shared with any third party.
After counselling has ended. Once counselling has ended your personal details record will be kept for five years from the end of our contact with each other and are then securely destroyed. If you want me to delete your information sooner than this, please tell me.