The Policy
Hope Vets LLP is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This policy (together with our Terms and Conditions any other documents referred to) sets out the basis on which any personal data we collect from you, or that you provide to us, will be processed by us. Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it. For the purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998 (the “Act”), the data controller is Hope Vets LLP of Shantock Hall Lane, Bovingdon, HP3 0NQ.
Your consent
By using our Website (www.hopevets.com) and by using the services provided by Hope Vets, you understand and agree that personal information you provide will be held on a database created and operated by us. You also consent to us sharing this information with third parties, including other practices (most notably Vets Now), where we believe this information could be useful in the treatment of an animal.
What information do we collect and why?
When you register a pet you will be asked for some essential information including your title, first name, surname, postal address, email address, telephone and if applicable payment information. You may also be requested to give your details for other reasons and of course to give us information about your pet, including authorising us to request and receive medical records from vet practices or other establishments. All these details are collected either in person, by telephone or electronically, to help us:
- register your details and keep them up to date;
- register your pet’s details and maintain their medical records;
- make appointments and remind you about these appointments;
- inform you about services we offer or that a third party offers which we believe may be of interest to you or alert you about issues which may be relevant to your pet;
- follow up on services you have received from us or other veterinary practices;
- process the fees due for any treatment;
- contact you about your pet, your account or credit status where required;
- help to prevent and detect fraud. We may need to disclose information to assist legal or debt recovery processes;
- deliver a more personally tailored service;
- respond to any issues or queries; and
- notify you about changes to our service.
How we protect your information
We endeavour to protect your information by:
- requiring password access to our Practice Management System;
- keeping your information up-to-date and accurate. Please note that, to do this, we require you to tell us if any of your details such as your name or address change; and
- having in place strict security procedures for the storage and disclosure of your information to prevent unauthorised access.
Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data so any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.
Your rights
You have rights relating to how we collect, use and store your personal information. Should you wish to exercise any of these rights, you may do so at any time by writing to us at the address given above. In some cases, we are permitted to charge a small fee of no more than £10 in respect of our administrative costs.
If you feel that your rights have been breached in any way, you should contact the Practice Manager at the address given above or lodge an official complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Our website may, from time to time, contain links to and from other websites that we do not control. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.
Cookies
Our primary purpose in having a website is to help people find us, learn about our services and also to help us communicate with users of the website about things we hope you will find relevant. We never set out to gather huge amounts of data about the users of our website but in order for our website to work properly it has to use ‘Cookies’ and so in theory we could have access to a lot of data that we’re really not that interested in.
In this context a cookie is an element of data that a website can send to your browser, which may then store it on the hard drive of your device. We advise you not to attempt to eat these cookies.
These cookies allow us to gather certain information about you when you use the website, including details of your domain name and IP (Internet Provider) address, operating system and browser. That stuff doesn’t mean much to us humans but it seems to help our computers connect.
Cookies also allow us to understand who has seen which pages. That’s useful because it could help us make the website more user friendly or provide you with customised information from the website.
So basically we use cookies so that we can give you a better and more targeted experience when you use and return to the website. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies but you do not have to accept cookies. If you are suspicious of cookies you should read the information that came with your browser software to see how you can set up your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie. This will give you the opportunity to decide whether to accept it or not.
Please note that third parties (including, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we have no control.
Changes to our Privacy Policy
Any changes we may make to our Privacy Policy in the future will be posted on this page.
