Client confidentiality

Your clients’ expectations regarding confidentiality

Your clients will expect that any medical or personal details that they share with you are kept confidential. Quite often they will also request that these details are kept in confidence from any medical professionals from whom they may be receiving treatment. This may be because they feel that their doctor or medical practitioner has let them down, or is not listening to them, or may have refused to refer the client on to you for treatment either because of funding difficulties or because they do not believe the therapy to be beneficial. Clients may also want to keep the fact that they are coming to you for treatments from certain family members. Depending on the nature of the work in which you are involved you may at times need to get the client’s permission to consult with their doctor.

Keeping personal information safe

The provisions of the Data Protection Act require you to keep all client records and personal information safe and secure. Any personal data should be physically locked away when not in use, either in a metal filing cabinet or, if the data is held on your computer, password protected and encrypted.

Sharing personal information

If you need to share any information about a client you must get their prior signed consent in writing. You must be specific regarding who you are going to share this information with, what you are going to share, and for what purposes. If you have reason to transfer a data file this should be encrypted for security reasons.

You should be particularly careful when requesting help or support from an egroup about a client’s problem to ensure they cannot be identified in any way – especially as the security provisions for egroups tend to be very poor. Similarly, if you seek advice from your peer group colleagues, or from your supervisor or mentor regarding aspects of a certain client’s problems or treatment plan, you should take care not to identify the client.

Raising awareness of your confidentiality policy

The fact that you are bound to treat any personal records in a highly confidential manner may not be apparent to all your clients, so it is good practice to raise awareness of this issue by featuring brief details about your confidentiality policy in your practice brochure, your code of practice and your website. You should also include a statement on all your emails and on your fax header sheets detailing the confidential nature of your work and the request that any inappropriately received faxes or emails are destroyed and you are notified. See Chapter 8 for a suitable form of words.

Keeping correspondence and telephone calls confidential

Any correspondence you send to your client should be clearly marked ‘Private and Confidential’, and there should be no business logos or other distinguishing marks on the envelope by which any other person picking up the post could identify your practice. You should check with your client in advance whether you can safely send any correspondence to their home address, and if not, get details of another address which is safe to use as a postal address. Similarly, you should check with your client during their first session which telephone number it is best to contact them on – some clients will only want you to call them on their mobile in order that they can choose whether or not to accept the call depending on their circumstances at the time. If a client does not want anyone else in the household to know about their treatment but can only give the usual house telephone number for contacting them on, you should ensure that your number is withheld should you need to ring them. If the client needs to ring you from home, you can advise them to dial another number after they have spoken to you, in order that your number cannot be picked up by another member of the household dialling last number recall or 1471.

Young people and confidentiality

Any young person aged 16 or over is considered a ‘responsible’ person in law and is therefore able to agree their own medical treatment whether this is through their GP, hospital or clinic, or whether this is a complementary or alternative therapy of their choosing. Parents may sometimes put pressure on you to release information about their 16 year-old, or will try to prevent them from having treatments with you. Just remember that your duty of care remains with your client, not their parents. The situation can become even more muddled where the parents are paying for the treatment and may threaten to withhold payment. If this is the case, you will have to decide how to handle this situation if you can’t reason this out with the parents. It may be that you decide to continue with the treatments and agree extended, or reduced, payment terms with the client, or you may decide to waive your fees altogether or get your client to ‘pay’ for their treatment by doing some leaflet distributing or marketing for you.