Collection of Personal Information

Primary Purposes

About Clients

We collect, use and disclose personal information in order to serve our clients. For our clients, the primary purpose for collecting personal information is to provide psychological services. For example, we collect information about a client's health history, including their family history, physical and psychological condition and function and social situation to help assess what their needs are, advise them of their treatment options and help them to receive the treatment they choose.

A secondary primary purpose is to obtain a baseline of health and social information so that in providing ongoing psychological services we can identify changes that are occurring over time. It would be rare for us to collect such information without the client's express consent, but this might occur in an emergency (e.g., the client is unconscious) or where we believe the client would consent if asked and it is impractical to obtain consent (e.g., a family member passing a message on from our client and we have no reason to believe that the message is not genuine).

About Members of the General Public

For members of the general public, our primary purpose for collecting personal information (e.g., name, address, telephone number, email address) is to make them aware of psychological and counselling services in general or our practice in particular. On our website we only collect the personal information you provide and only use that information for the purpose you gave it to us (e.g., to respond to your email message).

About Mental Health Practitioners, Psychology Interns and Contract Staff

For people who are contracted to do work for us (e.g., mental health practitioners, such as psychologists, psychological associates, social workers, psychoeducational consultants, counsellors and therapists, child and youth counsellors; psychology interns; marketing personnel), our primary purpose for collecting personal information is to ensure that we can contact them in the future (e.g., for new assignments, supervision) and for necessary work-related communication (e.g., sending out paycheques). Examples of the type of personal information we collect for those purposes include home addresses and telephone numbers. It is rare for us to collect such information without prior consent but it might happen in the case of a health emergency (e.g., SARS outbreak) or to investigate a possible breach of law (e.g., if a theft were to occur in the office). If mental health practitioners, psychology interns or contract staff wish a letter of reference or an evaluation, we will collect information about their work related performance and provide a report as authorized by them.

Related and Secondary Purposes

Like most organizations, we also collect, use and disclose information for purposes related to or secondary to our primary purposes. The most common examples of our related and secondary purposes are as follows:

• To invoice clients for services that were not paid for at the time of the visit or were paid for by personal cheque, to process credit card payments or to collect unpaid accounts.
• To advise contract workers of special events or opportunities (e.g., a seminar, development of a new service) that we have available.