Hepatitis C Trust Privacy Notice
The Hepatitis C Trust is committed to respecting and protecting your privacy. Once you choose to provide us with personally identifiable information (any information by which you can be identified), it will only be used to support your relationship with The Hepatitis C Trust and to provide services to you. If that means sharing personal data with partner organisations such as the NHS, we will obtain your specific consent to do this.
The type of personal information we collect
We collect and use personal information on different groups of individuals including:
- Service users
- Helpline callers
- Contractors and suppliers
- People making general enquiries
- Funders and donors
- Survey respondents
- Professional experts and consultants
- Staff and job applicants
People who use HCT services, including our helpline
As part of delivering, managing and improving our services, we use personal information that includes information that identifies you such as your name, date of birth and address. We may also collect and use sensitive types of personal information, including information about racial or ethnic origin, health, or sexual orientation. We will always let you know in advance if we are going to collect such sensitive information.
This helps us understand who we’re reaching, and the impact of our services for different groups. We analyse this data on an ongoing basis, and may use statistical data in published reports, commentaries or research. No information that might identify individuals is used in our reports or research without specific consent.
People calling our helpline may do so anonymously if they wish.
We keep personal data securely for seven years, and after this it is deleted.
Website visitors, enquiries and donations
When someone visits our website, we collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site, and we do not identify or try to identify anyone within this.
If you make a donation to The Hepatitis C Trust, sign up to an event, request resources or sign up to receive communications from us, we will normally collect your name and contact details.
We will retain your bank account information if you are making a regular donation via Direct Debit. We may also keep other information, such as your date of birth, to enable us to understand our donors and supporters.
Job applicants and HCT staff
We use information provided by job applicants to process applications and to monitor recruitment. Where we disclose information to a third party, for example collecting references, we will inform candidates in advance.
Details of unsuccessful candidates will be held for 12 months. We keep statistical information about applications to help inform our recruitment, but no personal information that would identify individuals.
All employed staff members and engaged volunteers have an HR file. This is needed to manage people’s employment and comply with the law. The information within individuals’ files is kept securely and only used for HR. We retain these HR files for seven years after an individual leaves our employment.
How we get the personal information and why we have it
Most of the personal information we process is provided to us directly by the individual for one of the following reasons:
- Services and support, for example people contacting our helpline, receiving support from our community or prisons teams, or undertaking our training
- Fundraising and donations
- Registrations for newsletters or other communications
- Employment
- Partnership working and contracting
We use the information that you have given us in order to:
- Deliver services
- Plan, monitor, review and improve services
- Fundraise
- Conduct research
- Support and manage our employees and volunteers
We may share personal information with NHS organisations, Government and partner charities for the purposes of service delivery, service improvement and patient support. This is only done with individual consent, unless we need to share it for safety or safeguarding reasons.
We share aggregated information which does not include personal data with funders, NHS organisations, Government, partner charities and research partners. This may also be published.
We do not rent or sell your personal information to any other organisations. We will not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.
Legal basis for processing information
Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the lawful bases we rely on for processing this information are:
a) Your consent. You are able to remove your consent at any time. You can do this by contacting admin@hepctrust.org.uk.
b) We have a contractual obligation, for example in delivering our services.
c) We have a legal obligation, for example around safeguarding.
d) We have a vital interest, for example in situations where an individual is at risk of immediate and serious harm.
e) We have a legitimate interest in processing the data, for example for service evaluation or for managing employees.
How we store your personal information
We take appropriate physical, electronic and managerial measures to ensure that we keep your information secure, accurate and up to date, and that we only keep it as long as is reasonable and necessary, and in line with Government regulations.
Helpline and patient support data is securely stored in our client management databases.
We keep these records for seven years. We will then dispose your information by permanently deleting any electronic records, and securely destroying any paper records.
Your data protection rights
Under data protection law, you have rights including:
- Your right of access – You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information.
- Your right to rectification – You have the right to ask us to rectify personal information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete.
- Your right to erasure – You have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances.
- Your right to restriction of processing – You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.
- Your right to object to processing – You have the the right to object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.
- Your right to data portability – You have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances.
You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.
Please contact us at admin@hepctrust.org.uk if you wish to make a request.
Links to other websites
Our website contains links to other websites run by other organisations. This privacy policy applies only to our website and services‚ so we encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit. We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other sites even if you access them using links from our website.
In addition, if you linked to our website from a third party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners and operators of that third party site and recommend that you check the policy of that third party site.
Updating your information or opting out of communications
If your personal information changes or you would like to stop receiving our fundraising communications, please email admin@hepctrust.org.uk, write to The Data Protection Officer, The Hepatitis C Trust, 72 Weston Street, London SE1 3QG or telephone 020 7089 6220.
Notification of change of Privacy Policy
We reserve the right to amend this privacy statement. You are advised to visit this website section periodically in order to keep up to date with the changes in our privacy policy. This Policy was last updated in January 2022.
If you have any questions regarding our privacy statement, please contact admin@hepctrust.org.uk or write to the Data Protection Officer, The Hepatitis C Trust, 72 Weston Street, London SE1 3QG.
How to complain
If you have any concerns, would like to give feedback, or would like to make a complaint about our use of your personal information, please contact us at admin@hepctrust.org.uk or The Hepatitis C Trust, 72 Weston Street, London SE1 3QG.
Please address your query to the Data Protection Officer.
You can also complain to the ICO if you are unhappy with how we have used your data.
The ICO’s address:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Please note that following government guidelines the offices are closed and staff are working from home.
Via web form using this link: https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/
Helpline number: 0303 123 1113
ICO website: https://www.ico.org.uk