Privacy Policy

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Privacy of personal information is an important principle to Psychological Services. We are committed to collecting, using and disclosing personal information responsibly. We are open and transparent as to how we handle personal information. This document describes our privacy policies.

What is Personal Information?

Personal information is information about an identifiable individual. Personal information includes information that relates to: an individual’s personal characteristics (e.g. gender, age, home address or phone number, education and training, family circumstances); health (e.g. health history, health conditions, health services received); or, activities and views (e.g. occupation/profession, ideas and concerns expressed by an individual).

Our primary purposes for Collecting Personal Information are summarized below.

About Clients

We collect, use and disclose personal information only in order to provide psychological services to our clients. For example, we collect information about a client’s health history, including their family history, physical condition and function and social situation in order to help us assess what their mental health needs are, to advise them of their options and then to provide the psychological services they choose to have. A second primary purpose is to obtain a baseline and ongoing record of psychological functioning so that in providing psychological services we can monitor treatment progress and identify changes that occur over time.

In some situations, the primary purpose of collecting personal information would be to conduct an assessment to provide a professional opinion about the individual’s psychological functioning. With the client’s consent, the opinion would be reported to the appropriate person or agency, for example, an insurance company, Children’s Aid Society and rehabilitation companies.

It would be rare for us to collect or disclose personal information without the client’s express consent, but this might occur in an emergency (in this case the client would be notified in writing as soon as possible) or if we believe the client would consent if asked (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).

Here are some additional reasons why We Collect Personal Information.

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:

q q To invoice clients for services that were not paid for at the time.

q q Psychologists in supervised or autonomous practice are regulated by the College of Psychologists of Ontario who may inspect our records and interview our psychologists as a part of their regulatory activities in the public interest. The College of Psychologists of Ontario has its own strict privacy obligations.

q q The cost of some services provided by the organization to clients is paid for by third parties (e.g. private insurance, First Nations and Inuit Health Branch, Canadian Forces). These third-party payers often have your consent or legislative authority to direct us to collect and disclose to them certain information in order to demonstrate client entitlement to this funding (e.g. Canadian Forces identification, First Nations identification).

Protecting Personal Information

We understand the importance of protecting personal information. We have taken the following steps to address this issue.

q q Paper information is either under supervision or secured in a locked or restricted area.

q q Electronic information is transmitted through a dedicated line only to people and agencies that have a privacy policy.

LIMITS TO PROTECTION OF PRIVATE INFORMATION

Limits to the protection of private information include: legally mandated disclosure to Children’s Aid Society, College of Psychologists of Ontario and Court orders to release information, search warrants for a file in a criminal or a legal case, and subpoenas.

Retention and Destruction of Personal Information

We need to retain personal information for 10 years to ensure that we can answer any questions you might have about the services provided and for our own accountability to external regulatory bodies.

q Clients may have questions about our services after they have been received. We also provide ongoing services for many of our clients over a period of months or years for which our previous records are helpful. We retain our client information for a minimum of ten years after the last contact to enable us to respond to those questions and provide these services. The College of Psychologists of Ontario also requires us to retain our client records. For clients who are seen before the age of 18, records are retained for ten years following their 18th birthday.

q q If a private practice were sold none of the client records would be transferred to or accessed by the new owners.

q q We destroy electronic information by deleting it and, when the hardware is replaced, we ensure that the hard drive is physically destroyed.

You Can Look at Your Information

With only a few exceptions, you have the right to see what personal information we hold about you. We can help you identify what records we might have about you. We will also try to help you understand any information you do not understand (e.g. abbreviations, technical language, etc.). We reserve the right to charge a fee for such requests. We may ask you to put your request in writing. If we cannot give you access, we will tell you the reason, as best we can, as to why we cannot give you access.

If you believe there is a mistake in the information, you have the right to ask for it to be corrected. This applies to factual information and not to any professional opinions we may have formed. We may ask you to provide documentation that our files are wrong. Where we agree that we made a mistake, we will make the correction and notify anyone to whom we sent this information.

This policy is made under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

For more general inquiries, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Canada oversees the administration of the privacy legislation in the private sector. The Commissioner also acts as a kind of ombudsman for privacy disputes. The Information and Privacy Commissioner can be reached at:

112 Kent Street

Ottawa, Ontario K1A 1H3

Phone (613) 995-8210 | 800-282-1376 | Fax (613) 947-6850 | TTY (613) 992-9190