Privacy Statement

Respecting and protecting your privacy is important. This statement outlines the policy and procedures with respect to collecting, using and disclosing your personal health information.

Collection of Your Personal Health Information

Your personal health information is collected only directly from you, except when you have provided consent to obtain such information from others (e.g., reports of previous assessments or other services and where the laws requires or allows us to collect or share information without your consent as outlined in the Limits of Confidentiality statement where there is a risk of harm to yourself, someone else, as it relates the Child and Family Services Act or other relevant legislation; where someone is in a safety sensitive positive or in cases where there is an emergency situation. Only that information from you that is believed to be reasonably necessary to provide you with services is collected.

Use of Your Personal Health Information

Your personal health information is used to provide you with service, which includes information for assessment, case formulation, and what may deemed as treatment and prevention. This also includes using the information for service planning, service monitoring and billing purposes.

No unauthorized access to your information is permitted without your written consent   However, a staff or contract worker or other member in the process of conducting business on behalf of New Beginning Counselling Services is permitted to access only information that is necessary to carry on business with New Beginning Counselling Services. Your record may be accessed for quality assurance purposes. All persons involved in such activities are required by law to maintain the confidentiality of the accessed information.

Disclosure of Your Personal Health Information

With only a few exceptions, the Limits of Confidentiality statement, regarding your personal health information will not be disclosed to persons outside this office without your express consent. If there are other limits of confidentiality in your situation, New Beginning Counselling Services will identify and discuss them with you before proceeding with service.

When consenting to the disclosure of your personal health information, you may restrict us from sharing all or any part of your personal information. However, if, in our opinion, the information is reasonably necessary for another health service provider or agency to provide appropriate service, we are required by law to inform the other provider/agency that you have refused consent to provide some needed information. Although the law allows, under strict conditions, access to personally identifiable health information for research purposes, it is our policy not to allow external researchers access to any personal health information.

Your Right of Access to your Personal Health Information Record

With only a few exceptions, you have the right to access your personal health information, and to request copies of the information. However, where services are rendered through third party billing such as an Employee and Family Service Provider agencies, clients are required to contact the third party payer to request copies of such records. Your personal health record will be maintained  for a minimum of 7 years after your last contact, and in the case of children/adolescents, from when the child/adolescent turned 18 years of age or from the year of last contact. In the event we are no longer able to provide services, e.g., death, disability or retirement  your personal health record will be placed under the supervision of an authorized person and will remain securely stored until the appropriate time lapse has occurred at which time existing files will be permanently destroyed or otherwise destroyed. If you believe the information in your record is not accurate, you may make a written request to correct your record directly to the third party when applicable or to New Beginning Counselling Services where third party billing is not applicable. If we do not agree with the correction of your request, you may file a notice of disagreement into your record. In some cases, where the service provider/ counsellor or authorized individual believes that reviewing or accessing your record may cause undue duress, access may be denied or restricted.

Limits of Confidentiality

When obtaining services from a counsellor, it is important that you understand the issue of confidentiality and the limits of confidentiality. Everything that you tell a counsellor is confidential and will be kept in the strictest confidence; the fact that you are even attending appointments is confidential. There are, however, some exceptions to this:

1. By law, a counsellor has a duty to report cases of suspected child abuse or neglect or miss treatment according to the Child and Family Services Act.In such direct cases, the Children and Family Services will be contacted. Services may be suspended.

2. By law, if you inform a counsellor that you have been sexually abused by a regulated health care professional, the counsellor is required to report the name of the professional to their regulatory body. The counsellor is not permitted to report your name without your consent.

3. A court of law has the power to subpoena a counsellor, along with your record, and require the counsellor to testify. In addition, the court can issue a court order allowing for the search and seizure of your record. A counsellor is not considered an expert witness.

4. Although not required by law, it is our personal practice to break confidentiality and take the appropriate action if there is a, in our opinion, a significant risk that you may harm yourself or someone else. This may include, but is not limited to, informing significant others, potential victims and/or the appropriate legal authorities.

5. Although not required by law, it is our personal practice to inform your family physician and the Ministry of Transportation of a concern over your capacity to drive.

6. Information will be shared with your consent or with the consent of your duly appointed and authorized legal representative. That is to say, a counsellor will release with either verbal or written (preferable) consent from you or your representative, any authorized information to specific named parties. Such releases of information usually specify exactly what is to be released, the purpose of the release and the period of time for which the release is valid. Such a release does not imply any ongoing right to release information and may be revoked at any time by you or your appointed representative.

 

Children

It is also our personal practice, when we see children or adolescents, to attempt to keep the parent(s) informed of the child’s progress and specific information, which in our judgement, is appropriate or necessary to be shared with the parent(s). Generally speaking, however, children are provided with the same or similar rights to confidentiality, as adults, and in the case of older adolescents with exactly the same rights as adults, except when a mature minor assessment results deems that the child is capable and competent in understanding the nature of the counselling process. In such latter cases parents or guardians are not informed of the presence or absence of mature minors who self-consent to counselling.

Depending on your specific situation there may be other limits of confidentiality that will be discussed with you if necessary.

Internet Use

Use of any on-line modality such as email for forms is not considered private or confidential. As such, this practice refrains from engaging in or adopting electronic use as a primary mode of communication and refrains from including personal identifiers whenever possible. Use of electronic medians is a risk by potential and existing clients, at their own risk. This web site may use cookies to store information solely for the purpose of better of marketing identifiers. Your personal information is never stored, sold or traded. Children under the age of 18 are not permitted to use this site to arrange an appointment or engage in dialog without formal parental consent. We receive, collect and store any information you enter on our website or provide us in any other way that has been accumulated by our web hosting agency and not New Beginning Counselling Services except that information that allows us to communicate with you to render services.. New Beginning Counselling Services, does not collect or store computer information, data, cookies or IP address or other internet usage. Our web servers collect the Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet; login; e-mail address; password as related to accessing our web site; computer and connection information and purchase history. New Beginning Counselling Services does not directly use software tools to measure or collect user information. Our Internet service access providers do. Our Internet Service providers, namely Weebly.com and Wix. com or Psychology Today or other Internet Web pages that promote New Beginning Counselling Services may use software tools to measure and collect session information, including page response times, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information, and methods used to browse away from the page. New Beginning Counselling Services collects personally identifiable information (including name, email and any information transmitted through web forms for the purpose of accessing information about our services in order to carry on business and provide confidential services to clients. Password, communications; payment details (including credit card information, comments, feedback, product reviews, recommendations, and personal profile is not collected by New Beginning Counselling, but may be collected by the Internet Provider services that host this web site.

When you conduct a transaction on our website, as part of the process, we collect personal information as identified and as such you give us your name, address and email address. Your personal information will be used for the specific reasons stated. Third party Internet providers collect such Non-personal and Personal Information for the following purposes: To provide and operate the services; To provide our Users with ongoing customer assistance and technical support; To be able to contact our Visitors and Users with general or personalized service-related notices and promotional messages; To create aggregated statistical data and other aggregated and/or inferred Non-personal Information, which we or our business partners may use to provide and improve our respective services; To comply with any applicable laws and regulations.

Our company is hosted on the Wix.com platform and Weebly.com platforms. Wix.com and Weebly.com provides us with the online platform that allows us to sell our products and services to you. Your data may be stored through Wix.com and Weebly.com data storage, databases and the general Wix.com and Weebly.com applications. They store your data on secure servers behind a firewall. All direct payment gateways offered by Wix.com and used by our company adhere to the standards set by PCI-DSS as managed by the PCI Security Standards Council, which is a joint effort of brands like Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover. PCI-DSS requirements help ensure the secure handling of credit card information by our store and its service providers. Our third party providers, namely Weebly.com or Wix.com or other external agencies may contact you to notify you regarding your account, to troubleshoot problems with your account, to resolve a dispute, to collect fees or monies owed, to poll your opinions through surveys or questionnaires, to send updates about our company, or as otherwise necessary to contact you to enforce our User Agreement, applicable national laws, and any agreement we may have with you. For these purposes Third Party providers may contact you via email, telephone, text messages, and postal mail. New Beginning Counselling Services will only contact you, as requested to answers any questions you have and about any services you require and that we require in order to carry on business with you. Concerns about third party usage should be directed to the third party. By accessing our web site, that being New Beginning Counselling Services,, you waive  and release any responsibility to New Beginning Counselling Services, it’s staff and or employees.  New Beginning Counselling Services web site does  not directly track personal information through the use of cookies, flash cookies, web beacons, etc., in which the hosting company of our web site adopts in order to track visitor profiles for their purposes. It's important to note that third-party services, such as Google Analytics or other applications offered through the Wix App Market or Weebly app, placing cookies or utilizing other tracking technologies through Weebly or Wix´s services, may have their own policies regarding how they collect and store information. As these are external services, such practices are not covered by the Weebly, Wix  or New Beginning Counselling Privacy Policy. If you don’t want us to  contcat you for rendering services, please contact New Beginning Counselling Services at: newbeginning.counseling@gmail.com. If you have issues or concerns regarding information that is stored or used by a  third party which, is attributed to the web site hosting and Internet usage please contact weebly.com and wix.com as New Beginning Counselling Services is not responsible for third party usage, data, analytics, cookies or bot usage.

We reserve the right to modify this privacy policy at any time, so please review it frequently. Changes and clarifications will take effect immediately upon their posting on the website. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here that it has been updated, so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we use and/or disclose it.