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Privacy Statement

GVG Brooks Equine Veterinary Practice is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information.

This Privacy Policy describes how we collect and use personal information about you during and after your working relationship with us, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It applies to our clients, our suppliers, our website users and other third party processors. If you have any queries regarding your personal information or how we process our data, please contact us at admin@gvgbrooksequine.co.uk.

GVG Brooks Equine is a “data controller”. We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK with reference ZA490013.

This policy applies to our clients, our suppliers, our website users and other third party processors. This policy does not form part of any contract of employment or other contract to provide services. We may update this policy at any time.

It is important that you read this policy, together with any other privacy policy we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal information about you, so that you are aware of how and why we are using such information.

Data protection principles
We will comply with data protection law. This says that the personal information we hold about you must be:

1. Used lawfully, fairly and in a transparent way.

2. Collected only for valid purposes that we have clearly explained to you and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes.

3. Relevant to the purposes we have told you about and limited only to those purposes.

4. Accurate and kept up to date.

5. Kept only as long as necessary for the purposes we have told you about.

6. Kept securely.

 

We process the following categories of personal data:

To register you with our practice
  • We obtain your full name and contact details to register you and your animal at our practice. These details are held securely on our Practice Management System, Merlin, provided by MWI, in line with industry security standards.
To provide you with veterinary services and products
  • We use your full name, contact details, address, and account information to book a face-to-face or telephone consultation with one of our vets, make a referral to a specialist clinic, lab or other provider that supports us in providing veterinary care, prescriptions, and prescription medication.
  • We use your full name, contact details, postal address, and details about your order to deliver the products that you have purchased from us, or we have prescribed to you.
  • We use your payment card details to process payments you make through our websites, whatsapp, or in practice. Our chosen payment processors are Worldpay, American Express, Paypal and Stripe. We do not store any financial details.
To provide customer service to you
  • We use your full name, contact details and any other information that you provide us with when contacting us through our website, WhatsApp, or social media account, via email or telephone or when visiting a practice to respond to your query or resolve a complaint.
  • We do not intend to collect or process special category data however, if you voluntarily provide us with this information, we will only process it in order to respond to your query. Any special category data you provide will be deleted as soon as your query is resolved.
To personalise and improve your experience when visiting a practice’s website or App
  • We will use information about how you interact with our website, App, and services to target our adverts so that they are most relevant to you.
To inform you about products and services that may interest you
  • If you provide us with your consent, we will use your full name, email address, pixel tracking, cookie data and preferences to receiving marketing communication to send you information relating to offers, services and animal health advice. Our Cookie Notice on our website provides information about how we use pixels and cookies.
To keep in touch with you
  • We use your full name, contact details and postal address to send you service communications, such as reminders of appointments, vaccination, dental and worming reminders, and important information relating to your practice or account.
To ensure a practice’s website, App and veterinary services operate properly
  • We use technical information about your device (such as your IP address, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types, versions and screen sizes, operation system and platform, URL clickstream to and from our website and App and download errors) to ensure the website is secure and works on your device. We also use this information for management information and reporting duties.
To develop and improve our products and services 
  • We use information about how you interact with our website, App, services and emails and your survey and feedback responses to learn where to target our adverts so that they are most relevant to you and to improve our customer service.
  • We may record any calls made to and from the practice to provide quality service, training and assurance to our employees and clients.
  • If there a requirement for a consultation to be recorded for training and professional development purposes, you will be notified of this prior to the consultation.
To comply with our legal obligations
  • We may use the data that we collect about you to ensure we comply with any legal obligations that may be imposed on us.
  • We will use information about you, how you interact with our services and your contact details to inform you of product recalls or other product quality issues, and to comply with our legal obligations in connection with the sale of age restricted products. We use different methods to collect data including through

a) Direct interactions– you may give us any of the above information when you use our website, or when corresponding with us via telephone, Whatsapp, post, email, or face-face in our practice. We may also collect data if you attend any events that we are participating in.

b) Automated technologies or interactions– as you interact with our website, we will automatically collect some technical data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies, server logs and other similar technologies. We may also receive this technical data about you if you visit other websites which employ our cookies.

c) Third parties– we may receive information about you from third parties such as:

  • Providers of technical, payment and delivery services
  • Microchip companies and databases
  • Appointed persons or guardians
  • Advertising networks (based on your cookie consent)
  • Analytics providers
  • Credit reference agencies
  • Where the animal is referred to us from another practice, information that practice holds about you
  • Debt recovery agencies
  • Insurance companies

Where we have received information from other sources, we will have informed you when we collected that data that it may be shared internally and combined with the data that we collect about you from your use of this website.

Lawful basis for processing your personal data

Depending on the processing activity, we rely on at least one of the following lawful bases for processing your personal data under the UK GDPR:

  • Consent– where you have given us your consent (or explicit consent where appropriate)
  • Contract– it is necessary for entering into or the performance of a contract
  • Legal Obligation– it is needed to comply with a legal obligation that is imposed on us
  • Legitimate Interest– it is necessary for our legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests
  • Vital interest– it is necessary in an emergency situation, such as emergency medical care
  • Public task– it is necessary for the performance of a specific task that is in the public interest that is set out in law
Who we share your personal data with

We share your personal data with the following categories of companies so that we can provide the service you have requested from us.

  • Companies that help us to form a contract with you such as:
    • Payment service providers, including Worldpay, Paypal, Stripe
    • Partners such as Virtual Recall that enable us to send you reminders
    • Partners such as VetHelpDirect, that enable us to send and receive Whatsapp messages and process payments through Whatsapp
    • Technology service providers that support our IT, host our websites, and help us analyse the data we hold
  • Insurance companies (following submission of a claim form by you)
  • Microchip registers
  • Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (where it is in the public interest or the interests of animal welfare)
  • Indemnity providers (Veterinary Defence Service)
  • Other professional and legal advisors
  • Debt recovery agencies
  • Law enforcement and fraud prevention agencies
  • Companies approved by you (such as social media sites)
  • Referrals to other vets or specialist clinics and labs or other providers who support us in providing veterinary services to the animal entrusted into our care
  • Partners involved in your horse’s veterinary care (such as physiotherapists, chiropractors, osteopaths, Equine Dental Technicians, farriers)
  • Suppliers (when ordering products and when we are obliged to report a suspected adverse event associated with providing veterinary drugs or microchips)
  • Advertisers and advertising networks that require the data to select and serve relevant adverts to you, including Facebook Ad Manager (we will only send marketing communications to you where you have consented to receiving them from us),
  • Where any part of our business is outsourced, sold, or merged, and where permitted by law, we will share your data with the new provider so that we may continue to provide services to you. They may use your personal data in the same way as set out in this policy. We will of course inform you of any such change and give you an opportunity to opt out of your data being shared with a new provider.
  • Academic bodies (some information about your account may be used by our vets when participating in academic research or completing additional qualifications)

Before we share your data with any third party, we will check:

  • They can provide sufficient guarantees regarding the confidentiality and security of your personal data.
  • We have a written contract with them which defines how they can use your data, how they can protect it and what to do with it when our relationship with them is terminated; and
  • We only share the data that they need in order to fulfil their services to us.
Keeping your personal data secure

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your information from being accidentally lost, used, or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered, or disclosed.

We limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions, and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach, and we will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

If you would like to know more about how to protect your information and your computer and devices against fraud, identity theft, viruses, and other online problems, please visit Get Safe Online. Get Safe Online is supported by HM Government and leading businesses.

Data retention

We will only retain your data for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax or reporting requirements.

Being in control of your own information

Under the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 you have some important rights available to you. In summary, these include:

  • Be informed about how we use your personal data(hopefully this privacy notice explains it all)
  • Access to the personal data that we hold about you 
  • Request that we transfer elements of your personal data to another service provider
  • Require us to correct any mistakes in the personal data which we hold about you
  • Ask us to erase your personal data in certain situations 
  • Withdraw your consent at any time where the processing of your personal data is based on consent(for example, unsubscribing to our direct marketing communications)
  • Object to or restrict or suspend us from processing your personal data in certain circumstances(for example, if you want to restrict processing whilst we are establishing the accuracy of your personal data)
  • Request not to be subjected to automated decision-making that significantly affects you
  • The right to complain to the Data Protection Commission(this is the UK’s data protection regulator, and you can do this via the ICO’s website)

If you want to exercise your rights, please contact us at admin@gvgbrooksequine.co.uk.

If you fail to provide personal information

If you fail to provide certain information when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract we have entered into with you (such as providing a benefit or service) [or we may be prevented from complying with our legal obligations (such as to ensure the health and safety of our workers).]

Change of purpose

We will only use your personal information for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your personal information for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Please note that we may process your personal information without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law.

Some personal data may be collected about you from the forms and surveys you complete, from records of our correspondence and phone calls and details of your visits to our website, including but not limited to personally identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. GVG Brooks Equine will use such information to identify its visitors. GVG Brooks Equine may also collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its website.

GVG Brooks Equine website uses cookies, which is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Our website uses cookies to help GVG Brooks Equine identify and track visitors and their website access preferences. GVG Brooks Equine website visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before visiting GVG Brooks Equine’s website. If you would like to know how to do this, please look at the help menu on your browser. You can also find out more about the way cookies work on http://www.cookiecentral.com.

Any information GVG Brooks Equine holds about you and your business encompasses all the details we hold about you and any transactions including any third-party information we have obtained about you from public sources and our own suppliers, such as credit processing agencies or references, provided by you in the course of your application. GVG Brooks Equine will only collect the information needed so that it can provide you with veterinary and prescription services.

Changes to this privacy policy

We reserve the right to update this privacy policy at any time, the most up to date policy is available on our website. We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.

The details for each of these contacts are:

Data Protection Regulator:

GVG Brooks Equine, B1-2 The Courtyard, Dovers Farm, Lonesome Lane, Reigate, RH2 7QT

Telephone 01737 246109 or email admin@gvgbrooksequine.co.uk

Information Commissioner’s Office

Telephone 0303 123 1113 or complete a form at: https://ico.org.uk/concerns/handling/