Privacy Policy

The processing of personal data is governed by the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR). This legislation replaced the previous data privacy law, giving more rights to you as an individual and more obligations to organisations holding your personal data.

Whose information does this Privacy Policy apply to?

This privacy notice applies to information we collect from patients, prospective patients, former patients and visitors to this website. 

What is personal data?

Personal data relates to a living individual who can be identified from that data. Identification can be by the information alone or in conjunction with any other information in the data controller’s possession or likely to come into such possession. Examples of personal data we may hold about you include your contact and appointment details. 

Special category data is a sub-category of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs or trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person’s sex life or sexual orientation. Examples of special category data we may hold about you include your patient notes. 

How do we process your personal data?

We comply with our obligations under GDPR by keeping personal data up to date; by storing and destroying it securely; by not collecting or retaining excessive amounts of data; by protecting personal data from loss, misuse, unauthorised access and disclosure and by ensuring that appropriate technical measures are in place to protect personal data.


Our patients, prospective patients and former patients

We use your name, address, telephone number and email address to make and rearrange appointments. We are unable to send or receive encrypted emails so you should be aware that any emails we send or receive may not be protected in transit. We will also monitor any emails sent to us, including file attachments, for viruses or malicious software. Please be aware that you have a responsibility to ensure that any email you send to us is within the bounds of the law. 

We record all appointments for patients attending our clinic to keep a record of when you were treated for tax purposes and to secure potential evidence in the event of a criminal prosecution, civil litigation, insurance claim or complaint to our regulatory body, the British Acupuncture Council

We may use your date of birth to help identify patients with the same name to avoid mistakes being made as to safe and appropriate treatment, for identification purposes if referring a patient to another health practitioner, and for identification purposes if writing to a registered medical practitioner so that they correctly identify the patient. 

We use your presenting complaint and symptoms reported by you and any relevant medical and family history you have told us for the purposes of making a diagnosis and formulating a treatment strategy. 

We use your GP’s name and address in the event we need to contact your GP including in an emergency and because it is a mandatory requirement in the British Acupuncture Code of Professional Conduct

We keep a record of and refer to that record of any treatment given and details of progress of your case, including reviews of treatment planning to enable us to review the diagnosis and treatment strategy; and to secure evidence in the event of criminal proceedings, civil litigation, an insurance claim or complaint. 

We keep accident records for any patients or visitors who are involved in accidents at our clinic in accordance with UK Health and Safety legislation including the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR) to comply with the law and to secure evidence in the event of criminal proceedings, civil litigation, an insurance claim or complaint. 

In the event of an adverse incident occurring to any of our patients we report the matter to the British Acupuncture Council and our insurance company to enable the insurance company to deal with any potential claims and help the British Acupuncture Council develop its safe practice guidelines, as well as providing research data and information for the insurers and other interested parties.

Where relevant we maintain records of your consent to treatment, or the consent of your next of kin, in order to be able to prove that you (and/or parent/guardian/next of kin) have given informed consent to treatment to secure evidence in the event of a civil claim, criminal prosecution, insurance claim or complaint. 

We do not store any of your health and wellbeing records electronically. All of your records are stored on paper. At no time are the records left unattended. 

Complaint handling

When we receive a complaint, we make up a file containing the details of the complaint. We may need to provide personal information collected and processed in relation to complaints to the British Acupuncture Council or our insurance company.  We will keep personal information contained in complaint files in line with our retention policy. It will be retained in a secure environment and access to it will be restricted according to the ‘need to know’ principle. 

Sharing your personal data

Your personal data will be treated as strictly confidential, and will be shared: with named third parties with your explicit consent; with the relevant authority such as the police or a court, if necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which we are subject eg. a court order; with your doctor or the police if necessary to protect yours or another person’s life; with the police or a local authority for the purpose of safeguarding a children or vulnerable adults; or with our regulatory body, the British Acupuncture Council, or insurance company in the event of a complaint or insurance claim being brought against us; or our solicitor in the event of any investigation or legal proceedings being brought against us. 

How long do we keep your personal data?

We keep your personal data for no longer than reasonably necessary. We keep patient records for a period of seven years from the point at which you cease being a patient in accordance with the British Acupuncture Code of Professional Conduct for following reasons: 

Tax purposes: so we can accurately report our finances to tax authorities on an annual basis and ensure we can comply with an auditing activity. 

Secure potential evidence in the event of a criminal prosecution: in the event we are required to produce this information in the context of a criminal prosecution. 

Civil litigation: in the event that any litigation is brought against either ourselves, or action you may be take on a third party. 

Insurance claim or complaint to the British Acupuncture Council: so that the complaints procedure has the necessary evidence to be concluded. In the event that Joshua Enkin becomes ill or dies, an interim Data Protection Officer will be appointed to close the affairs of the business and ensure that its continuing obligations under GDPR are met and that all rights of the data subject are upheld for any period required by law. At any time you may request that changes are made to your contact details.


Our website users

Cookies and comments

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

If you have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal or security purposes.

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (eg. images, articles etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.


Contact details

To exercise all relevant rights, queries or complaints, please contact Joshua Enkin via info@joshuaenkin.co.uk.

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