Privacy, Confidentialty, and Ethics

General

We are committed to responsible data management and subscribe to the principles of the current GDPR and other data protection legislation in the United Kingdom. We are committed to maintaining the privacy of our users and maintaining the security of any personal information received from them. If you contact NexusWest or receive any of our services you may be asked to provide basic personal information which will be kept securely and in complete confidence. If you have a consultation with us you may be asked to complete forms which will aid us in providing you with the best possible form of therapy.

No Information provided by you will ever be made available for sale or use by third parties. The information is used solely for accurate clinical assessment and therapeutic evaluation and contact with you. If you do not receive services from NexusWest, your information will only be used by us to compile completely anonymous data about how many people contact us and for general clinical profiling. Your identity and circumstances will never be revealed to any third party without your consent.

Should you agree to a referral to one of our outside consultants/colleagues, information about our assessment, any treatment interventions and your progress will be provided, in confidence, to these other professionals with your consent. Without such consent, outside referrals may not be possible however, except in cases of emergency.

Summary of Confidentiality Policy

Our psychotherapists, counsellors and our various consultants provide confidential treatment. This means that your treatment will not be discussed with anyone outside the team without your express consent. However, there are some important legal and professional limits to confidentiality.

Professional practice requires that therapists and counsellors discuss their work with a clinical supervisor who can monitor their practice and ensure that it continues to be of high quality. Treatments discussed in this confidential setting are never spoken about beyond that.

The law also places certain obligations on psychotherapists and counsellors:

In the event of a claim or legal dispute, psychotherapists and counsellors may be required to provide copies of their case notes or to appear in person when ordered to do so by a Judge.

Psychotherapists and counsellors are legally obliged to report the following to the appropriate authorities:

• Current child abuse – including, but not limited to, paedophilia.
• Threats of deliberate harm against the life of another person or to oneself.
• Threats to commit terrorist acts.
• Endangerment of vulnerable and/or dependent persons of any age.
• Psychotherapists are obliged by their registering bodies to abide by their codes of ethical practice.

Ethical practice includes, for example:

• Not exploiting clients emotionally or sexually.
• Not making false claims about their training, abilities or practice.
• Maintaining appropriate confidentiality.
• Being properly insured to undertake psychotherapy, counselling, or coaching practice.
• Not undertaking psychotherapy or counselling practice if under the influence of alcohol, intoxicants including illegal substances, or being otherwise incapacitated through illness.

Suspected unethical practice should be reported in the first instance to the Director, Dennis Durby. Contact can be made by email to: dennis.d@nexuswest.co.uk

Code of Ethics

NexusWest subscribes to the Ethical Framework of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). Individual consultants to whom clients may be referred are required to subscribe to the Codes of Ethics of the professional groups of which they are members. It is the client’s responsibility to enquire of any consultants about their current professional associations’ codes of ethics.

NexusWest expects the professionals on its referral network to both subscribe to and have available to clients all information related to their ethical codes and personal practice standards.

A copy of the BACP’s Ethics for Counselling and Psychotherapy can be found here: http://www.bacp.co.uk/ethical_framework

Non-discrimination

NexusWest practises a policy of tolerance and respect towards all persons seeking relief from psychological and emotional distress.

We do not discriminate against people on the basis of age, gender, gender identifications, sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, physical disability, religion, spiritual beliefs and practices or political views.

For the avoidance of doubt, this policy statement is not exhaustive and is subject to legislation current in England and Wales at the time of publication.

Form Submissions – Security

Google reCAPTCHA Privacy Policy

Our primary goal is to make our website as safe and secure as possible for you and for us. To ensure this, we use Google reCAPTCHA from Google Inc. For the European region, Google Ireland Limited (Gordon House, Barrow Street Dublin 4, Ireland) is responsible for all Google services. With reCAPTCHA, we can determine whether you are really a flesh and blood person and not a robot or other spam software. By spam we mean any unsolicited information sent to us by electronic means. With the classic CAPTCHAS, you usually had to solve text or image puzzles for verification. reCAPTCHA from Google mostly spares you the trouble of solving such puzzles. In most cases, all you need to do here is simply check the box to confirm that you are not a bot. With the new Invisible reCAPTCHA version, you do not even have to check the box. How exactly this works and, above all, what data is used for this purpose is explained in this privacy policy.

What is reCAPTCHA?

reCAPTCHA is a free Captcha service from Google that protects websites from spam software and abuse by non-human visitors. This service is most often used when you fill out forms on the Internet. A Captcha service is a kind of automatic Turing test, which is supposed to ensure that an action on the Internet is done by a human and not by a bot. In the classical Turing test (named after the computer scientist Alan Turing), a human being determines the difference between bot and human. With Captchas, this is also done by the computer or a software program. Classical Captchas work with small tasks that are easy for humans to solve but present considerable difficulties for machines. With reCAPTCHA, you do not have to actively solve puzzles anymore. The tool uses modern risk techniques to distinguish people from bots. Here, you only have to check the text box “I am not a robot”; while Invisible reCAPTCHA renders this unnecessary. With reCAPTCHA, a JavaScript element is embedded in the source code and then the tool runs in the background and analyses your user behaviour. From these user actions the software calculates a so-called Captcha score. Google uses this score to calculate the probability that you are a human being even before you enter the Captcha. reCAPTCHA or Captchas are generally used whenever bots could manipulate or abuse certain actions (such as registrations, polls, etc.).

Why do we use reCAPTCHA on our website?

We only want to welcome people of flesh and blood to our site. Bots or spam software of various kinds are not welcome. That is why we pull out all the stops to protect ourselves and offer the best possible user-friendliness for you. For this reason we use Google reCAPTCHA from Google. This is how we can be pretty sure that we remain a “bot-free” website. Through the use of reCAPTCHA, data is transmitted to Google in order to determine whether you are really a human being. In this way, reCAPTCHA serves the security of our website and consequently also yours. For example, without reCAPTCHA, it could happen that a bot registers as many e-mail addresses as possible during sign-up in order to “spam” forums or blogs with unwanted advertising content. With reCAPTCHA, we can avoid such bot attacks.