Privacy Notice for Families and Professionals
How we use your information
About this notice
Dorset Parent Infant Partnership (DorPIP) is a Dorset-based charity supporting the relationship between parents and their babies. When you come to us for support, or when someone refers you, we collect information about you and your baby.
This notice explains what we collect, why we collect it, what we do with it, how long we keep it, and what rights you have. It is written for parents and carers, and for the professionals who refer families to us.
If anything here is unclear, or you would like it in another format, please contact us using the details at the end.
Who we are
DorPIP is the data controller for the information described in this notice. That means we decide what information is collected and how it is used, and we are responsible for looking after it.
Email: contact@dorpip.org.uk
If you have a question or concern about how we handle your information, contact us first and we will do our best to resolve it.
What information we collect
About you as a parent or carer
Your name, date of birth, address, phone number and email. Your relationship status and household circumstances. Information about your health and wellbeing, including your mental health during and after pregnancy. Your experience of pregnancy and birth, including any previous loss. Whether you have experienced abuse, harm or neglect, and whether that is ongoing. Whether alcohol or drug use is affecting your family. Your employment, housing and financial circumstances.
We also ask about your ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and whether your gender is the same as the sex you were assigned at birth. These questions are optional and you can choose "prefer not to say". We ask them so we can check we are reaching all the families who need us, not just some of them.
About your baby or babies
Their name, date of birth or expected due date, and whether they were born early. Their health and development, including any conditions or difficulties. Whether they are adopted or fostered.
About other people connected to your family
If you tell us about a co-parent or another carer, we record their name, relationship to your baby, and contact details where you give them. If you give us an emergency contact, we record their name, relationship to you and phone number, and whether you have given us permission to contact them.
If professionals are already working with you, such as a health visitor, GP, social worker, midwife or others, we record their name, role and contact details.
About the support we provide
Which services you receive, when, where and with whom, and whether you attended each session. Our practitioners record structured observations of you and your baby together during sessions. This includes a clinical rating of how the relationship between you and your baby appears to be functioning, using a recognised professional framework, together with brief observations of how your baby settles, engages, seeks comfort, shows enjoyment and communicates. These are professional observations rather than tests, and they help us understand whether things are changing over time.
We also record our assessment of what support you need, the decisions we make about that support, and the reasons for them.
About digital life and parenting
We ask whether phones, screens or digital demands get in the way of being the parent you want to be, and whether you would like support with that. We ask because digital demands can affect how present and responsive parents feel able to be, and because it is something we can help with.
Where information comes from
Most of it comes from you, on the forms you complete and in conversation with our practitioners. Some comes from other people. A professional referring you, such as a health visitor, GP, midwife or social worker, gives us information when they make the referral. So might another organisation, or occasionally a family member. Where a referral is made on your behalf, the person making it is asked to confirm you have agreed to it.
Why we use your information, and our lawful basis
Data protection law requires us to have a lawful basis for using your information. Ours are set out below.
To provide our services, legitimate interests
We use your information to understand what support you need, decide whether we can help, deliver that support, and record what happens. Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: we are a charity providing parent-infant support, we cannot do that without this information, and families would reasonably expect us to use it in this way.
We have considered whether this use of your information is fair to you, and we are satisfied that it does not override your rights. Because your information includes health and other sensitive details, data protection law requires us to meet an additional condition. We rely on three, depending on what the information is for:
Health or social care purposes, for the information we use in providing therapeutic parent infant support. This condition requires that the processing is carried out by, or under the responsibility of, someone bound by a duty of confidentiality.
Safeguarding of children and of individuals at risk, for information we hold and use to protect a child or an adult from harm.
Equality of opportunity or treatment, for the questions about ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. This condition carries specific protections: we do not use these answers to make decisions about you, and you can ask us to stop processing them.
Our processing is carried out by, or under the responsibility of, practitioners, supervisors and managers who are bound by duties of confidentiality through their contracts with us and through our policies and safeguarding procedures.
To keep children and adults safe, legal obligation and vital interests
Where we are concerned about the safety of a child or an adult, we may use and share information without your consent. We do this under our legal obligations to safeguard children, and in some situations to protect vital interests where there is a risk of serious harm. Information about safeguarding concerns may sometimes include details of alleged criminal conduct, for example where domestic abuse, police involvement or child protection proceedings involve an alleged criminal offence. Data protection law treats information relating to alleged criminal offences as criminal offence data and sets additional requirements for handling it.
We record and use this information under the safeguarding of children and individuals at risk condition in Schedule 1 of the Data Protection Act 2018. That condition allows us to process such information without consent where seeking consent would place a child or an adult at greater risk. Our safeguarding policy sets out who may see this information and what we do with it.
Where we ask your consent
There are a small number of things we ask your permission for, separately, and which you can decline without affecting the support you receive:
Contacting the professionals you have told us about
Sending a registration form to your co-parent
Contacting your emergency contact
Using your anonymised information for research and service evaluation
You can change your mind about any of these at any time.
Who we share your information with
We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for marketing.
Safeguarding. Where there is a concern about the safety of a child or an adult, we may share information with the professionals involved, usually a health visitor, GP or social worker, and occasionally another organisation or the local authority.
Wherever we can, we will talk to you first and explain what we are doing and why. There are situations where we cannot, and where the law does not require us to: where telling you would place a child or an adult at greater risk, where doing so might interfere with an investigation, or where there is not time because someone is in immediate danger. We take those decisions carefully and we record our reasons.
Our systems. Our records are held in Zoho CRM, together with Zoho Forms and Zoho Flow, provided by Zoho Corporation. Our data is held in the Zoho European data centre. Zoho acts as our data processor and is bound by its published data processing terms, which restrict what it may do with the information we hold.
Email. We use Microsoft Outlook to communicate with families and with the professionals working with them. This means emails we send and receive about your support, including any documents attached to them, are held in Microsoft systems, within the United Kingdom. Microsoft acts as our data processor and is bound by its published data processing terms.
Funders and commissioners. We report on our work to the organisations who fund us. These reports use combined figures, for example how many families we supported, and what changed for them overall. They do not name individual families, and we do not share individual records with funders.
How long we keep your information
Records about children and families are kept for a long time. This is deliberate: information about a child early life can matter many years later, and safeguarding records in particular may be needed long after our involvement ends.
Records about your family and your baby, including our clinical records and any safeguarding information, are kept for 30 years. This follows our Board-approved retention schedule and reflects national guidance on children records and safeguarding.
Enquiries and referrals that do not proceed are kept for one year, unless there is a safeguarding concern or another reason to keep them longer.
Financial records relating to our work are kept for seven years, or longer where they are linked to a family clinical record.
When information reaches the end of its retention period, it is reviewed before being securely destroyed.
Records connected to a safeguarding concern, complaint or legal matter are not deleted without review.
Your rights
You have the right to:
See the information we hold about you. Ask us and we will provide it, normally within one month.
Have inaccurate information corrected.
Ask us to delete information. We will consider any request, but we cannot always agree. We have legal and safeguarding reasons for keeping records, and we will explain if we cannot delete something.
Object to how we use your information. Where we rely on legitimate interests, you can object to what we are doing and explain why. We will stop unless we can show compelling grounds that override your interests, or unless we need to continue to establish or defend a legal claim. Where we process information for safeguarding purposes or because the law requires it, we may not be able to stop.
Ask us to restrict how we use your information while a concern is being resolved.
Withdraw consent for any of the specific things listed above that you have given permission for, at any time. This applies only to those activities. The rest of our record-keeping does not rely on your consent, so withdrawing it does not remove your records.
The right to data portability does not generally apply to our processing, because we do not rely on your consent or on a contract with you to provide our services.
Where information concerns your baby, you can exercise these rights on their behalf. As your child grows, they may in time exercise their own rights over information we hold about them.
To exercise any of these, contact us using the details above.
Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us and we will look into it.
You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioners Office, the UK regulator for data protection.
Website: ico.org.uk
Helpline: 0303 123 1113
Automated decisions
We do not make decisions about you using automated means alone. Our system records information and brings it together, but decisions about whether we can help you and what support you receive are always made by our practitioners.
Changes to this notice
We review this notice at least annually. Where we make significant changes, we will make that clear on our website and, where appropriate, tell families directly.
If you are worried about something now DorPIP is not an emergency or crisis service. If you or your baby are in immediate danger, please call 999.
You can also contact your GP or NHS 111, or Samaritans on 116 123 at any time.