Your personal information is used for a number of different reasons depending on what it is. We only collect what is necessary in order to provide our service to you. The tables below set out what information is collected, our purpose for collecting it and our lawful basis (why we need to collect it) in line with data protection legislation.

Your personal details, such as your name, date of birth, address, email address, phone number and insurance policy number.

Please note that, where we are required to process your personal information as part of our contract with you and you do not provide us with this information, we may not be able to provide our services to you.

Additionally, we may automatically obtain information about you such as your image or your vehicle registration number via our CCTV systems operating at our practice. We operate CCTV for our legitimate interests of helping to secure our premises and keep our customers, visitors and staff safe.

We may also record telephone calls for training, quality assurance and monitoring purposes.

Your payment information

This is information provided when you are required to pay directly for any practice services. We don’t store your card details, GlobalPay are our payment services provider.

Your contact history with us

This covers things you’ve said, whether that be via email, telephone or the contact us page on our website. Calls made to our practice may be recorded as referenced above.

We may also anonymise and/or aggregate your personal information, so you aren’t identifiable. This process may be used to facilitate the testing of our IT systems, research, data analysis, improving our site and developing new products and services.

There are several ways in which we obtain your information. Most information is voluntarily provided by yourself via completing our forms or conversing with one of our members of staff during registering, creating an online account, placing orders, or signing up for Horse Health Programme.

You have trusted us with your information, therefore the first thing we want to assure you of is that we do not, and shall not, sell any of your personal data to any third party.

However, we share your data with the following categories of companies as an essential part of being able to provide our services to you and your animals:

• Companies in the CVS group, as different parts of our group are responsible for different activities such as MiNightVet emergency care.
• Referral practices so that they can arrange appointments, tests, treatments and services if your animal needs to be referred to a hospital or specialist.
• Laboratories and Animal Crematoria within the CVS group, so that we can arrange tests, treatments and services and obtain results on your behalf.
• Your insurer, so that we can obtain permission to perform certain investigations and treatments at their expense. Also, to arrange payment for investigations and treatments provided.
• Banks and payment service providers (including our chosen payment provider, GlobalPay), so that we can deal with payments and refunds where necessary.
• Credit reference and fraud prevention agencies, so that we can obtain information about you and help to detect and prevent fraud.
• Debt collection agencies, should you fall behind with payments for the services we provide.
• Email providers, printers and mailing houses, so we can send you reminders, administrative information relating to the way we provide services to you, information about animal health issues relevant to you and marketing communications if you agree.
• Law enforcement, government and other agencies should we receive a request from them to assist with any investigations, or we deem it necessary.
• Other practices, if you decide to move to a new practice and want to transfer your information.
• Charities, in the unfortunate event that your animal finds themselves with a charity for the facilitation of rehoming or other means, we may provide them with any necessary details for the continuation of animal welfare or other relevant matters.
• Third parties such as the police, RSPCA or other authorities where we are unable to reach you for consent and unlikely to be able to for some time, we may disclose necessary information to third parties for the facilitation of continuity of animal care.
• Third party software providers, where we implement and you make use of our third party provided apps, your data will be shared to facilitate a more convenient, streamlined and more accessible process.

We take the sharing of your data very seriously and only do so where necessary for the purposes set out above. Where your data is shared with third party software providers, we ensure that they have the appropriate data protection procedures, policies, and certificates in place before transferring any information.

If you would like to know more about the companies we may share personal data with, or how to find out more on how they will use your data, please contact us at the details below.

Please note that not all CVS group practices or other service providers such as laboratories or crematoria use CVS branding.

If you have agreed, we’ll send you marketing messages to keep you aware of what we’re up to and to help you see and find our products and services.

If you no longer wish to receive them then you can unsubscribe at any time via the following methods:

• Click the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of any marketing email communication that we send you.
• Contact the practice directly via phone or email and ask to be removed from our mailing list.

If you’ve asked us to stop sending any kind of marketing, we will action the withdrawal of your consent as soon as possible, although we ask that you please be patient so that we can update all of our systems. You may continue to receive messages from us whilst we process your request.

If you decide to opt-out of marketing messages, we will continue to send ‘service communications’ such as appointment/vaccination/treatment reminders.

All of the personal information we process is stored within the European Economic Area (EEA). Therefore, we can guarantee that your data will be handled in accordance with the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation. It’s important for us to be transparent with you so if this were ever to change, we would let you know in advance.

We will keep your data for as long as we need to in order to fulfil the purposes we have set out in this Privacy Notice. If you cease to be our client, we will still need to keep some of your data to meet our legal and regulatory obligations, resolve disputes, prevent fraud and abuse and to enforce our Terms & Conditions. We will only keep what is necessary for these purposes.

We will keep CCTV images for up to 30 days and telephone call recordings for up to 3 months from the date of recording unless it is necessary for us to keep them for a longer period.

You can contact us if you no longer wish to be a client and ask that we deactivate your account. However, we will keep the data we need even after your account has been deactivated.

You have a number of rights relating to your personal information, which are as follows:

• The right to be informed about how your personal information is used, most of which is within this notice.
• The right to access personal information we hold about you.
• The right to rectify personal information we hold about you if it is inaccurate or incomplete (we ask that you speak to a member of our practice team if any of your contact details have changed).
• The right to request that we delete your data, stop processing it or collecting it in some circumstances.
• The right to stop marketing messages, further information of which is above in the ‘Marketing messages’ section.
• The right to object to the processing of your personal information for the furtherance of our legitimate interests.
• The right to portability where we would port or transfer elements of your personal information to you or another practice.

If you wish to exercise any of these rights, or have any questions, please contact us via the contact details at the end of this notice.

We will keep this notice under regular review and publish any updates in practice or on this website. Any significant changes will be communicated with you directly so you are kept up to date on how your data is handled.

This privacy notice was last updated on 06 February 2023.

Client feedback is essential in ensuring that we provide the best possible service to you. If you have any questions about this notice, want us to stop using your information or exercise any of your rights then please don’t hesitate to contact us:

Data Protection Officer
CVS House, Owen Road, Diss, Norfolk IP22 4ER
dataprotection@cvsvets.com

Complaints

If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can make a complaint to us via the contact details above.

Whilst we would always prefer to have the opportunity to resolve your complaint first, you can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) if you are unhappy with how we have used your data. Our ICO Registration number is Z7208449.

The ICO’s address:

Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF
Helpline number: 0303 123 1113
Website: https://www.ico.org.uk