Confidentiality and About Health Assured

Health Assured (HA) offers a confidential service in order to encourage individuals to seek support when they need to, without fear of their Inn/employer/representative body/regulator finding out. Whilst HA work hard to reduce the stigma associated with seeking support, they recognise the importance of individuals feeling confident that they have anonymity through this service.

All HA’s staff are appropriate qualified and experienced and are governed by and adhere to the respective Code of Ethics and Practice of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and the British Psychological Society.

On the telephone helpline Health Assured have counsellors trained in 140 specific disciplines. Callers are triaged by a central telephone system and may be signposted to resources or referred for counselling sessions with a specific expert.

The counselling team have been trained to diploma level with at least two years’ and 450 hours’ post qualification supervised counselling. They must also provide evidence of on-going clinical supervision in accordance with the Codes of Ethics and Practice of their respective professional bodies and must be willing to undergo an enhanced DBS check.

HA is a registered provider with Employee Assistance Professional Association (EAPA) and works to the guidelines provided by this expert body, as well as the ethical guidelines provided by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). HA adhere to strict data protection standards in relation to confidentiality. All of HA’s counsellors follow the BACP guidelines around clients’ privacy and confidentiality in order to prevent unauthorised disclosure. Confidentiality is explained to all counselling clients and client consent is obtained wherever necessary.

All calls are confidential between the client and the relevant professional – the only exception being if it is considered that there is a serious risk of harm to the caller or others. As part of the service, HA capture personal details including name, address, contact number and GP details. These details are captured to support at risk situations and therefore this detail is captured for all cases, regardless of whether there is a perceived risk at that time.

HA use Salesforce.com’s cloud for data storage, which is certified to ISO27001 standards. From a reporting perspective, management information is provided on a consolidated, anonymous basis in order to provide informative utilisation and trend data, whilst maintaining the confidentiality of the service.

All HA staff have their own unique username and password. Their Access Control Policy states that passwords should not be shared and that machines should be locked whenever they are not in use. The level of authorised access is set to the minimum required to effectively carry out daily duties and the level of access is specifically authorised by line management.