Privacy & cookies

PRIVACY NOTICE  –  Action against Medical Accidents (AvMA)

(Last updated: 11 May 2018)

THE SHORT VERSION

At AvMA we are committed to protecting your privacy.

If you have contacted AvMA as a member of the public seeking information, advice, or representation we will not share any personal data with anybody outside AvMA  unless we have your express consent or are required to do so by law.  We will only use the information you give us for the purposes for which it is given.  We will not send you general information about AvMA unless you have given permission.

If you are a business or professional contact likely to be interested in the field of patient safety and medical accidents we may collect basic contact information so we can tell you about our services and conferences as well as our campaigning and policy work.

Whether you are a member of the public who asked for information to be sent or a business contact you can tell us not to send you information and we will remove you from our mailing lists. Most of our general communications about AvMA  are by email and include a link to unsubscribe.

MORE DETAIL

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force on the 25th May 2018 and gives individuals additional rights with respect to their personal data and imposes additional responsibilities on AvMA.

  • We respect your personal data. We recognise that if you are contacting us for advice much of the information you give us is sensitive personal information that imposes additional responsibilities on AvMA to protect and secure this information.
  • We store it securely, protect it and make sure nobody has access to it who shouldn’t
  • We will delete it when you ask us to. We will not retain personal information for longer than is necessary
  • Only access it when we have a valid reason to do so
  • Only share what is necessary and relevant
  • Ensure that your information is only shared with a third party with your consent, or if we’re required to do so by law such as where a child is at risk, or if someone has a serious intention of harming themselves or someone else. We do not sell personal information.
  • Where you’ve given us permission and your contact details, we might get in touch to ask for feedback on the service you received and your overall experience of AvMA and whether the information provided has been helpful to you.

If you are a member of the public and you have contacted us seeking information, advice or representation we recognise the data you provide to us includes sensitive medical information.  When information is no longer needed for these purposes we will anonymise the data by removing information that identifies the persons affected including contact details.   This anonymised data may be used to support our campaigning and policy work so for example we can say how many enquiries we have had, what kind of medical accidents we have been asked to advise about.   We will not give information to a third party without your permission; examples of where you might ask us to provide information to somebody outside AvMA include enquiries where you have asked us to refer you to a specialist solicitor, or we are helping you with the NHS complaints procedure and you have asked us to contact the healthcare provider, or you have asked us to arrange representation at an inquest.

Helpline phone calls – Phone calls are recorded for training and quality purposes. These recordings are in addition to the information collected and held in our electronic case management systems.

We may ask if we can contact you about to obtain feedback about the service provided and whether the information was useful.  We may also ask if we can send you information about the work we do and how you can help us, this may include information about our fundraising activities.  All our communications will explain how you can tell us to stop sending further mailings; most of our communications of this kind are by email only which will include a link to unsubscribe.

If you are a member of our Lawyers’ Service we hold contact information so that we provide the agreed services including providing details of medico-legal experts, Lawyer Service Group meeting dates and attendance, AvMA training and conferences dates and discounts, the Lawyers Service Newsletter.

If you are a solicitor on AvMA’s panel we hold information relating to your application to join the panel and ongoing details of panel membership including areas of special interest or expertise.  We also hold your information so that we can refer cases to you and your firm.  When you provide case studies to support panel applications and reaccreditation we ask you to redact any personal client information.

If you have attended one of our conferences as well as attendance records we also retain contact details to notify you of future events.  We normally make available a list of attendees to participants at our conferences.  This is limited to name and organisation details and does not include contact information.

If you are on our list of medico-legal experts we hold information about your area of expertise (we ask you to update this each year).  We may also hold feedback about the work that you do.

If you are have a professional or business interest in the work that we do we may collect basic contact information so we can tell you about our services and conferences as well as our campaigning and policy work.

Please let us know as soon as possible if anything relating to your contact details or issue changes, which may affect the information we hold.

Whether you are a member of the public who asked for information to be sent or a business contact you can tell us not to send you information and we will remove you from our mailing lists. Most of our general communications about AvMA  are by email and include a link to unsubscribe.

AvMA’s WEBSITE AND COOKIES

What are cookies?

As is common practice with almost all professional websites this site uses cookies, which are tiny files that are downloaded to your computer, to improve your experience. This page describes what information they gather, how we use it and why we sometimes need to store these cookies. We explain how you can prevent these cookies from being stored however this may downgrade or ‘break’ certain elements of the sites functionality.

For more general information on cookies see the Wikipedia article on HTTP Cookies.

How we use cookies

We use cookies for a variety of reasons detailed below. Unfortunately in most cases there are no industry standard options for disabling cookies without completely disabling the functionality and features they add to this site.

Disabling cookies

You can prevent the setting of cookies by adjusting the settings on your browser (see your browser Help for how to do this). Be aware that disabling cookies will affect the functionality of this and many other websites that you visit. Disabling cookies will usually result in also disabling certain functionality and features of this site.

Google Analytics

This site uses Google Analytics which is one of the most widespread and trusted analytics solution on the web for helping us to understand how you use the site and ways that we can improve your experience. These cookies may track things such as how long you spend on the site and the pages that you visit so we can continue to produce engaging content. For more information on Google Analytics cookies, see the official Google Analytics page.

Embedded content

Some of the content on our site is provided by third parties. This includes but is not limited to: Google Maps for interactive mapping, YouTube or Vimeo for hosted video and Flickr for images. When you visit a page containing content from one of these sites a cookie may be set. We do not have any control over these cookies and you should check the relevant third party website for more information about these.

More information

Hopefully that has clarified things for you and as was previously mentioned if there is something that you aren’t sure whether you need or not it’s usually safer to leave cookies enabled in case it does interact with one of the features you use on our site.

PRIVACY NOTICE AMENDMENTS

We may update our data protection policies from time to time and this notice will be updated to reflect these changes.

CONTACT US

If you have any questions or concerns about how we use your information or wish to exercise any rights under the General Data Protection Regulation, please email us (we can’t give advice concerning medical accidents from this email address, but you can search for medical accident advice on AvMA’s website or you can phone our Helpline).  To help ensure that your email is brought to the attention of the correct member of staff please describe the matter as a DATA PROTECTION QUERY in the subject field of the email and copy the email to deputyceo@avma.org.uk

Alternatively you can write to AvMA (Data Protection Lead Officer), 82 Tanner Street, London SE1 3GN.