1.We respect your privacy
(a) Solace Psychology Pty Ltd (ABN 47643789262) respects your right to privacy and is committed to safeguarding the privacy of our customers and website visitors. We adhere to the Australian Privacy Principles (APP) contained in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Health Records Act 2001 (Vic). This policy sets out how we collect and treat your personal information.
(b) “Personal information” is information we hold which is identifiable as being about you.
(c) If you wish to make any comments or suggestions about our privacy policy, you can do so by contacting Solace Psychology via: info@solacepsychology.com. Any comments and/or suggestions will be reviewed and considered.
2.Collection of personal information
(a) Solace Psychology will, from time to time, receive and store personal information you enter onto our website, via an electronic form, provided to us directly or via email, provided to us by a third party on your behalf or given to us in other forms for the purposes of providing psychological services and managing our practice.
(b) You may provide basic information such as your name, date of birth, phone number, address, email address to enable us to place you on our waitlist, send information to your GP or medical professional, provide updates about our practice or services and process your billing and rebates. We may collect additional information at other times, including but not limited to, when you provide feedback, when you provide information about your personal or business affairs, change your content or email preference, respond to surveys and/or promotions, provide financial or credit card information, respond to legal and regulatory obligations or communicate with our customer support.
(c) Additionally, we may also collect any other information you provide while interacting with us such as clinical notes, treatment records and correspondence (such as referral letters and reports) that our clinicians receive or create in the course of providing counselling services .
(d) On occasion, unsolicited personal information is provided to Solace Psychology by individuals (or other entities) without it being requested. Solace Psychology deals with this personal information in accordance with the APP that relates to unsolicited personal information (APP 4).
(a) Solace Psychology collects personal information from you in a variety of ways, including when you interact with us electronically or in person, when you access our website, social media pages, via the registration forms and during your sessions with your clinicians as we provide our services to you. We may receive personal information from third parties. If we do, we will protect it as set out in this Privacy Policy.
(b) We may, at times, need to collect certain information from third parties such as:
Your referring GP or psychiatrist;
Your other healthcare providers and support service providers;
If you are a minor, your parent or guardian;
Your authorised representative or caregiver, if you have one;
Your private health fund or Medicare, in relation to billing and claims issues.
In the event of an emergency or crisis situation, we may need to collect information from your emergency contact person (if provided) or other people who may be able to assist (such as your family, friends or medical professionals).
4.Use of your personal information
(a) Solace Psychology may use personal information collected from you to provide you with information, updates and our services. We may also make you aware of new and additional products, services and opportunities available to you. We may use your personal information to improve our products and services and better understand your needs.
(b) Solace Psychology may contact you by a variety of measures including, but not limited to telephone, email, SMS, or mail.
(a) We may disclose your personal information to third parties outside of our practice insofar as reasonably necessary to achieve the purpose for which we collected the information (or directly related purposes that you would reasonably expect). Personal information is only supplied to a third party when it is required for the delivery of our services and usually with consent from you.
(b) We may from time to time need to disclose personal information to comply with a legal requirement, such as a law, regulation, court order, subpoena, warrant, in the course of a legal proceeding or in response to a law enforcement agency request.
(c) We may also use your personal information to protect the copyright, trademarks, legal rights, property or safety of Solace Psychology, www.solacepsychology.com , its customers or third parties.
(d) Information that we collect may from time to time be stored, processed in or transferred between parties located in countries outside of Australia. We generally do not disclose your personal information to overseas recipients in the usual course of business however some of our IT service providers use data hosting and processing infrastructure that is located across multiple countries, which include Australia, the US or in Europe.
(e) If there is a change of control in our business or a sale or transfer of business assets, we reserve the right to transfer to the extent permissible at law our user databases, together with any personal information and non-personal information contained in those databases. This information may be disclosed to a potential purchaser under an agreement to maintain confidentiality. We would seek to only disclose information in good faith and where required by any of the above circumstances.
(f) By providing us with personal information, you consent to the terms of this Privacy Policy and the types of disclosure covered by this Policy. Where we disclose your personal information to third parties, we will request that the third party follow this Policy regarding handling your personal information.
6.Administration of Solace Psychology
(a) Our practice uses a number of service providers, some of whom need to store and handle personal information on our behalf as part of their services. These include IT service providers that we use to host our website and practice management system, to provide analytics for our website, to manage our mailing list.
(b) Solace Psychology takes steps to ensure that the personal information handled by these service providers securely and in a way that is consistent with this Privacy Policy. We try to ensure that our contracts with these service providers require them to only use or disclose the information for the purposes of performing the relevant services for us.
(c) Our billing and claims management processes require the sharing of certain information in order to process payments and benefit claims. Where necessary, we may engage debt recovery service providers and provide them with the information that they reasonably require to perform their services.
(d) From time to time, we may also need to share information with our accountants, insurers, lawyers, auditors, professional accreditation bodies and regulators.
(a) Privacy laws protect the personal information of all clients, regardless of their age.
(b) Children under the age of 18 may be entitled to make privacy decisions independent of their parents, guardians and other family members, if the child has sufficient understanding and maturity to understand these decisions on their won.
(c) Where necessary, our psychologists will determine the decision-making capacity of a child in accordance with their professional judgement.
(e) Solace Psychology is committed to ensuring that the information you provide to us is secure. In order to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure information and protect it from misuse, interference, loss and unauthorised access, modification and disclosure.
(f) The transmission and exchange of information is carried out at your own risk. We cannot guarantee the security of any information that you transmit to us, or receive from us. Although we take measures to safeguard against unauthorised disclosures of information, we cannot assure you that personal information that we collect will not be disclosed in a manner that is inconsistent with this Privacy Policy.
9.Access to your personal information
(a) You may request details of personal information that we hold about you in accordance with the provisions of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). A small administrative fee may be payable for the provision of information. If you would like a copy of the information, which we hold about you or believe that any information we hold on you is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete, irrelevant or misleading, please email us at info@solacepsychology.com.
(b) We reserve the right to refuse to provide you with information that we hold about you, in certain circumstances set out in the Privacy Act.
(c) If you are a client of our practice and your request relates to your clinical records, we will handle your request in accordance with our Management of Personal Information Policy. You can obtain a copy of our Management of Personal Information Policy contacting us. Your request will generally be handled by the psychologist who was treating you and prepared the relevant records.
10.Complaints about privacy
(a) If you have any complaints about our privacy practises, please feel free to send in details of your complaints to:
625 Nicholson Street, Carlton North, VIC 3054
16 Harding Street, Coburg, VIC 3058
We take complaints very seriously and will respond to your complaint within a reasonable period, and in accordance with requirements of Applicable Privacy Laws.
When contacting us please provide as much detail as possible in relation to your question, concern or complaint. We request that you cooperate with us during this process and provide us with any relevant information that we may need to assess your complaint.
(b) If you are not satisfied with our handling of your complaint, you may contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and/or the Health Complaints Commissioner (Victoria):
Office of the Australian Information Commissioner
GPO Box 5218, Sydney NSW 2001
Telephone: 1300 363 992
Email: enquiries@oaic.gov.au
Health Complaints Commissioner
Level 26, 570 Bourke Street, Melbourne VIC 3000
Telephone: 1300 582 113
Website: https://hcc.vic.gov.au
(a) Please be aware that we may change this Privacy Policy in the future. We may modify this Policy at any time, in our sole discretion and all modifications will be effective immediately upon our posting of the modifications on our website or notice board. Please check back from time to time to review our Privacy Policy.
12.Website
(a) When you visit our website
When you come to our website www.solacepsychology.com we may collect certain information such as browser type, operating system, website visited immediately before coming to our site, etc. This information is used in an aggregated manner to analyse how people use our site, such that we can improve our service.
(b) Cookies
We may from time to time use cookies on our website. Cookies are very small files which a website uses to identify you when you come back to the site and to store details about your use of the site. Cookies are not malicious programs that access or damage your computer. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies but you can choose to reject cookies by changing your browser settings. However, this may prevent you from taking full advantage of our website. Our website may from time to time use cookies to analyses website traffic and help us provide a better website visitor experience. In addition, cookies may be used to serve relevant ads to website visitors through third party services such as Google Adwords. These ads may appear on this website or other websites you visit. We do not combine or associate any of this web traffic data with personal information that we hold (such as a client’s name or clinical records), and we do not use the web traffic data to work out the identity of visitors to our website.
(c) Social media pages
Our practice has pages on various social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. These pages are subject to the privacy policies of the relevant platforms.
We do not use our social media pages to communicate with our clients (or prospective clients) about clinical matters. If you would like to make an inquiry about counselling services, we encourage you to contact us directly by e-mail or phone.
Please use discretion in deciding what information you choose to post to the public sections of our social media pages (such as our Facebook wall and Instagram comment sections).
(d. Third party sites
Our site may from time to time have links to other websites not owned or controlled by us. These links are meant for your convenience only. Links to third party websites do not constitute sponsorship or endorsement or approval of these websites. Please be aware that Solace Psychology is not responsible for the privacy practises of other such websites. We encourage our users to be aware, when they leave our website, to read the privacy statements of each and every website that collects personal identifiable information.
You can contact us by:

E-mail: info@solacepsychology.com

Phone: (03) 7043 7070

Fax: (03) 9012 4350

Address:
625 Nicholson Street, Carlton North, VIC 3054
16 Harding Street, Coburg, VIC 3058