When you attend a session, we record the date and time that the session was held. This is so we can see how many sessions are happening in total and make sure we pay practitioners the right amount for any sessions they have given.
When you attend a session or cancel a session, we store this under your Spill ID, away from your identifiable information. If you opt into Team Check-in, a practitioner will look at how you’re feeling and your session attendance when evaluating whether or not to send you a message reminding you of additional support.
The practitioner who holds the session is also required to keep notes on the content of the session, in a secure system confidential within the service. These notes will be kept for seven years, and will only ever be accessed when there is legitimate need to do so, for example if you ever want access to the notes for your own records, or if Spill is ever legally required to provide the notes.
In the UK, Spill is bound by the Ethical Guidelines of the major UK bodies governing psychotherapeutic practice to keep all therapeutic conversations private and confidential within the boundaries set by UK law. Spill conversations between client and practitioner are confidential, but we have legal and ethical obligations.
For example, if a practitioner feels concerned about a client after a session, we would like to get in touch and offer additional support. Either our Clinical Supervisor or the client’s practitioner will get in touch with the client to follow up. If we can’t get in touch with the client we will try to get in touch with their emergency contact and, failing this, if deemed to be necessary we will get in touch with the emergency services. For more information on how this works in the UK, please have a look through our
Safeguarding Policy.
In the US, in line with US law for mental health care, our practitioners will contact the emergency services if they believe you might hurt yourself or someone else. There are a small number of other extreme situations where they will also do this - they vary state by state, but in general, they cover situations involving the abuse or neglect of children or other vulnerable people.
If your practitioner feels a bit concerned about you (for instance, if you miss a session without notice after discussing a difficult situation with them), then they will seek advice from other clinicians in the service, such as the Spill Clinical Supervisor or the Clinical Director, as is standard clinical practice. This means they'll share a summary of their concerns, which may also be shared with other Spill practitioners you speak with in the future: but the information remains confidential within the service.
After seeking advice, they may get in touch with you, to make sure you're OK. They will use the email address and phone number you gave Spill when you booked the session or any other contact details you gave them directly. We will never tell your employer or anyone else if this happens, unless you ask us to.
Following some sessions, we will email you a request for feedback. This is entirely optional to fill in. We store this information in order to improve our services and give feedback to counsellors.
When we process data about the appointment or send you a feedback request and process the results, our lawful basis is legitimate interest. When you share data about your mental wellbeing with our practitioners, our additional basis for processing is your public interest (Counselling). Should we need to share any data about you in an emergency then we will use vital interest as our lawful basis.
We retain this data for 7 years.
