Linkswood Equine Vets respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal information. This privacy policy sets out how we collect and process your personal data through your registration with our practice, use of our website or interaction through social media, including any data you may provide when you sign up to our newsletter, or purchase a product or service.
Links to third-party websites:
Our website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of every website you visit.
What information does Linkswood Equine Vets collect?
When you register as a client with us we will collect:
- Identity Data including first name, maiden name, last name, username or similar identifier, marital status, title, date of birth and gender.
- Contact Data including billing address, delivery address, email address and telephone numbers.
- Horse Data including the name, species, breed, gender, insurance records and medical history of your horse(s).
- Financial Data including bank account and payment card details. We do not store your card details, these are held by Adyen our payment service provider.
- Transaction Data including details about payments to and from you and other details of products and veterinary services you have purchased from us.
- Profile Data including your appointments, purchases or orders made by you, feedback and survey responses.
- Usage Data including information about how you use our website, products and veterinary services.
- Marketing and Communications Data including your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences.
How we collect your data:
Direct interactions. You may give us your Identity, Contact, Horse and Financial Data by filling in forms or by corresponding with us by post, phone, email or otherwise. This includes personal data you provide when you:
- Register your details as a new client and/or make an appointment
- Complete any form for example: online contact forms, consent forms, accident forms
- Engage with us on social media
- Book to attend an event we are holding, for example our evening talks
- Request our products or services
- Subscribe to our publications
- Request marketing to be sent to you
- Enter a competition, promotion or survey or give us feedback on our products or services
- Have given third parties permission to share personal information they hold about you and your pet(s) with us, for example transferring medical history, your details as a new client or update your details if they change.
How we use your personal data:
- Make appointments and deliver veterinary services.
- Process the fees due for any treatment.
- To process insurance claims.
- Contact you about your pet, your account or credit status where required.
- Deliver a safe and secure service by helping to prevent and detect fraud. We may need to disclose information to assist legal or debt recovery processes.
- Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.
- Enhance your experience by delivering a more personally tailored service.
- Notify you about changes to our service. We will also automatically collect data such as dates and times of your visits to the Website.
- When you register with us, we will ask you for your contact preferences. We may send you by SMS, email or post, details on offers, products, reminders and services which may be of interest to you. We may also telephone you to discuss treatment details or for market or service research.
- We may use for the purpose of promotional, marketing and publicity purposes in any media worldwide any comments or feedback (excluding personal data) which you post publicly or provide, without notice or without any fee being paid.
Who we share your information with:
- Referral practices so that they can arrange appointments, tests, treatments and services if your horse needs to be referred to a hospital or specialist. We will always ask your permission before sending across your information.
- Other veterinary surgeons/practices when you request your pet(s) history to be transferred. Patient and client information may be shared with other veterinary surgeons/practices. Please note that client and patient information is shared between the group of practices which cover emergencies. This is to ensure continuity of care for all patients that require on-going treatment. By registering with any of the practices detailed in our out of hours emergency policy you consent to the sharing of this information as detailed above and in the policy itself.
- Laboratories and Animal Crematoria, so that we can arrange tests, treatments and services and obtain results on your behalf.
- Your insurance company so that we can obtain permission to perform certain investigations and treatments. Also, to arrange payment for investigations and treatments provided to your horse.
- Banks and payment service providers, so that we can deal with payments and refunds where necessary.
- Our IT companies who support our business.
- Credit reference and fraud prevention agencies, so that we can obtain information about you and help to detect and prevent fraud.
- Debt collection agencies if you fall behind with payments for the services we provide.
- Royal Mail and Couriers.
- Drug companies.
- 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 agencies if we receive a request from them to assist with any investigations.
Marketing messages
If you have said we may, 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.
With each html email sent, you have the option of ‘unsubscribing’ from our mailing list at any time, thereby disabling any further such email communication from being sent. If you decide in the future that you do not want to receive such information, please email reception@linkswoodequinevets.co.uk or call us on 07878 865185 to change your preferences.
If you’ve asked us to stop sending any kind of marketing, please be patient so that we can update all of our systems. You may 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.
Cookies
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
Google Maps
These are Google Maps third party cookies, which are unique identifiers to allow traffic analysis to Google Maps.
Our website uses essential cookies to enable core functionalities such as security, network management, and accessibility. Our website may also use non-essential cookies, such as Google Analytics, to help us to improve our website by collecting and reporting information on how you use it.
Finally, our website may use marketing cookies to promote products which you may find interesting. These cookies will in almost all cases only collect anonymous data. For more information about the cookies we use please see our cookie policy.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, 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.
How long will we keep your data?
We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees and third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions, and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.
We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.
To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.
You can contact us if you no longer wish to be a client and ask that we deactivate your account. However, we have a legal requirement to keep some of your personal data even after you have asked us to remove it, for 7 years. We will only keep what we absolutely need to, and only to make sure we can meet our legal or regulatory requirements, resolve disputes, prevent fraud and abuse.
International transfer of data
We do not transfer your personal data outside the European Economic Area (EEA).
Your rights:
You have the right to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing purposes. We will inform you (before collecting your data) if we intend to use your data for such purposes. You can also exercise your right not to receive marketing information at any time by clicking the link on the bottom of each email or contacting us.
You have a right to access the personal data about you that is held by us. We reserve the right to charge a fee for this service. To obtain a copy of the personal information we hold about you, please write to us at the following address: Linkswood Equine Vets, Linkswood Stud, Catley Cross, Halstead, Essex, CO9 2PE.
You have a right to request correction of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected, though we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us.
You have a right to request erasure of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you have successfully exercised your right to object to processing, where we may have processed your information unlawfully or where we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law. Note, however, that we may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request.
If you make a request we have one month to respond to you.
Changes to 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 01 September 2022
How to contact us
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.
Post: Linkswood Equine Vets, Linkswood Stud, Catley Cross, Halstead, Essex, CO9 2PE.
Email: reception@linkswoodequinevets.co.uk
Call us on: 07878 865185
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.
You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) if you are unhappy with how we have used your data. We would appreciate the chance to resolve the matter ourselves in the first instance.
Our ICO Registration number is C1182397
The ICO’s address:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Helpline number: 0303 123 1113
Website: www.ico.org.uk