Privacy statement

Handle with Care (Black Country) Limited is committed to complying with the General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018.

As a data controller, we are responsible for how we process your information in the UK and we must comply with the data protection rules with regards to the data protection principles, our obligations and your rights as a UK citizen.

Our data processing activities are monitored by our Data Protection Officer to ensure that the information we collect is:

Processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner (Lawfulness, fairness, and transparency).
Collected only for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes, and not further processed in a way which is incompatible with those purposes (Purpose limitation).
Adequate, relevant, and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which it is processed (Data minimisation).
Accurate and kept up to date (Accuracy).
Not kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the data is processed (Storage limitation).
Processed in a way that ensures its security, using appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction, or damage (Security, integrity, and confidentiality).
Able to demonstrate documentary evidence portraying compliance with each of the data protection principles listed above (Accountability).

Your Rights

You have rights over the way we use your information:

You have the right to be informed about what information we collect and how it is used.
You have the right to ask for access to the information we hold on you.
You have the right to ask us to correct or update any information you think is incorrect or incomplete.
You have the right to object to your information being used and/or withdraw consent.
You have the right to ask us to stop using your information. This ‘right to be forgotten is only applied where there is no legal reason for us to continue to hold or use it.
You have the right to object to any automated decision making.
You have the right to ask us to transfer certain personal information or a copy of some of your information to you or to another organisation, including service providers, in a format they can use where this is technically possible, known as the ‘right to data portability’.
You have the right to withdraw any permission you have previously given us to use your information.

We are committed to keeping personal information secure to protect it from being inappropriately or accidentally accessed, used, shared, or destroyed, and against it being lost.

We will take appropriate physical, electronic and managerial measures to ensure that we keep your information secure, accurate and relevant. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal information on our instructions, and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We also have procedures in place to deal with any unsuspected data security breach. We will notify you and any professional regulators or other applicable regulator of a suspected data security breach where we are legally obligated to do so.

How do we use your information?

Data Protection says that we are allowed to use and share your personal data only where we have a proper reason to do so. The law says we must have one or more of these reasons and these are:

Contract: your personal information is processed to fulfil a contractual

arrangement

Consent: where you agree to us using your information in this way e.g. for storing your payment details.

Legitimate: this means the interests of GHSC in managing our business

Interests to allow us to provide you with the best products and service in the most secure and appropriate way e.g., to transfer your data to certain Third Party’s such as pharmacies or regulatory bodies.

Legal where there is statutory or other legal requirement to share the

Obligation information e.g., when we have to share your information for law enforcement purposes.

We collect your personal data only where necessary to fulfil the agreed services we provide and to meet legal, statutory, or contractual requirements.

To enter a contract and receive our care services you are obliged to provide us with your personal details and refusal to provide this or to give consent to services where requested may lead to withdrawal or the inability to deliver care services.

We may collect the following personal data when you provide it to us.

Personal Information

Retention

Processing job application forms, payroll information and other related recruitment documents to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

7 years after employment resignation date.

Assessment, care support plans & care review records are collected to support the delivery of care services to clients to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

7 years following the termination date each of care service.

Staff and client complaints, suggestions, and compliments feedback.

7 years

Staff and client customer satisfaction survey or quality assurance feedback to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

7 years

Accidents, incidents or near misses relating to our clients and employees to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

7 years following the termination date each of care service or employee resignation date.

We may share relevant information with:

Social services or Law enforcement authorities upon request.
Local safeguarding advisory boards regarding issues and concerns.
Third party data processors and service providers who are contracted to support us.
Relevant employees to provide care and compliance services.
Suppliers/partners who support business operations and delivery.
Healthcare professionals and any person nominated as your representative.
Public bodies that require evidence of our compliance with contractual and regulatory frameworks. E.g., the Care Quality Commission and Local Authorities.

We will not sell or trade your personal information with other third party without your consent.

Use of Third Parties

We will not share that information with any third parties without your consent unless we are required to do so by law or under other regulatory requirement.

We do make use of third-party service providers to help us fulfil our services and where we do, the third party is required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with our policies. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes and we only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

We use third party providers to:

Host and administer our website.
Process payroll services
IT security and systems
Staff and client records

Use of Cookies

This website uses cookies to better the users experience while visiting the website. Where applicable this website uses a cookie control system allowing the user on their first visit to the website to allow or disallow the use of cookies on their computer / device. This complies with recent legislation requirements for websites to obtain explicit consent from users before leaving behind or reading files such as cookies on a user’s computer / device.

Cookies are small files saved to the user’s computer’s hard drive that track, save, and store information about the user’s interactions and usage of the website. This allows the website, through its server to provide the users with a tailored experience within this website.

Users are advised that if they wish to deny the use and saving of cookies from this website on to their computers hard drive, they should take necessary steps within their web browsers security settings to block all cookies from this website and its external serving vendors.

This website uses tracking software to monitor its visitors to better understand how they use it. This software is provided by Google Analytics which uses cookies to track visitor usage. The software will save a cookie to your computer’s hard drive-in order to track and monitor your engagement and usage of the website, but will not store, save or collect personal information. You can read Google’s privacy policy here for further information [http://www.google.com/privacy.html ].

Other cookies may be stored to your computer’s hard drive by external vendors when this website uses referral programs, sponsored links or adverts. Such cookies are used for conversion and referral tracking and typically expire after 30 days, though some may take longer. No personal information is stored, saved, or collected.

Contact & Communication

Users contacting this website and/or its owners do so at their own discretion and provide any such personal details requested at their own risk. Your personal information is kept private and stored securely until a time it is no longer required or has no use, as detailed in the Data Protection Act 2018. Every effort has been made to ensure a safe and secure form to email submission process but advise users using such form to email processes that they do so at their own risk.

This website and its owners use any information submitted to provide you with further information about the products / services they offer or to assist you in answering any questions or queries you may have submitted. This includes using your details to subscribe you to any email newsletter program the website operates but only if this was made clear to you and your express permission was granted when submitting any form to email process. Or whereby you the consumer have previously purchased from or enquired about purchasing from the company a product or service that the email newsletter relates to. This is by no means an entire list of your user rights regarding receiving email marketing material. Your details are not passed on to any third parties.

External Links

Although this website only looks to include quality, safe and relevant external links users should always adopt a policy of caution before clicking any external web links mentioned throughout this website.

The owners of this website cannot guarantee or verify the contents of any externally linked website despite their best efforts. Users should therefore note they click on external links at their own risk and this website, and its owners cannot be held liable for any damages or implications caused by visiting any external links mentioned.

Adverts and Sponsored Links

This website may contain sponsored links and adverts. These will typically be served through our advertising partners, to whom may have detailed privacy policies relating directly to the adverts they serve.

Clicking on any such adverts will send you to the advertisers’ website through a referral program which may use cookies and will tracks the number of referrals sent from this website. This may include the use of cookies which may in turn be saved on your computer’s hard drive. Users should therefore note they click on sponsored external links at their own risk and this website and its owners cannot be held liable for any damages or implications caused by visiting any external links mentioned.

Social Media Platforms

Communication, engagement, and actions taken through external social media platforms that this website and its owners participate on are custom to the terms and conditions as well as the privacy policies held with each social media platform respectively.

Users are advised to use social media platforms wisely and communicate / engage upon them with due care and caution in regard to their own privacy and personal details. This website nor its owners will ever ask for personal or sensitive information through social media platforms and encourage users wishing to discuss sensitive details to contact them through primary communication channels such as by telephone or email.

This website may use social sharing buttons which help share web content directly from web pages to the social media platform in question. Users are advised before using such social sharing buttons that they do so at their own discretion and note that the social media platform may track and save your request to share a web page respectively through your social media platform account.

Shortened Links in social media.

This website and its owners through their social media platform accounts may share web links to relevant web pages. By default, some social media platforms shorten lengthy urls [web addresses] (this is an example: http://bit.ly/zyVUBo).
Users are advised to take caution and good judgement before clicking any shortened urls published on social media platforms by this website and its owners. Despite the best efforts to ensure only genuine urls are published many social media platforms are prone to spam and hacking and therefore this website and its owners cannot be held liable for any damages or implications caused by visiting any shortened links.

How to Get in Touch

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you and to have any inaccuracies in your information corrected. You also have the right to ask us to delete any personal information we hold about you. Please refer to your rights section for further details.

For all questions and concerns regarding the processing of your personal information, please write to:

Head of Compliance

Handle with Care (Black Country) Limited

Crescent House

Broad Street

Bilston

Wolverhampton

West Midlands

WV14 0BZ

Email: dpo@hwcbc.co.uk

The information Commissioner’s Office is the regulator for such activity and further information can be found on their website: https://ico.org.uk

Upon request, you can also view our:

Service User Privacy statement
Employee Privacy statement

Privacy Statement Alteration

We reserve the right to update this privacy notice at any time, and we will provide you with a new privacy notice when we make any substantial updates. We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.

This statement was last updated in November 2022.