In order to provide my service I will require personal data about yourself and your infant and as an IBCLC I am obligated to protect your confidentiality and keep your information secure. The information I may require (but is not limited to) could be related to your personal health, your birth experience and the overall health of your infant. The reason I will be requiring this data is because there may be factors that are relevant to your breastfeeding challenges. As well as asking about your personal health as described above, I will also be requiring your infant’s name and date of birth, and your name, address and contact details. The information I will keep will only be that which has been disclosed to me by yourself. Your data will be encrypted and password protected on my laptop and only accessible by myself.

After our consultation I will write a report to summarise our appointment and this will be sent to you via an encrypted email with your consent in the knowledge that emailing is not an inherently secure means of contact. If you do not wish to receive this report via email then please let me know. 

Depending on the outcome of our appointment it may be that I share that outcome with other members of your infant’s health care team (GP or Health Visitor for example) but I shall obtain verbal consent first and explain why I think the sharing of information is needed. No information will be shared without consent unless it is for Safe Guarding purposes or due to concern for the infant’s welfare. 

Any feedback that is left on my website or social media accounts will not contain any identifiable details about you or your infant.

Alongside emails, I also use text messages, WhatsApp and telephone calls to communicate with my clients. Any videos/images that are sent to me via WhatsApp will be immediately deleted after I have viewed them to prevent them being seen by anybody else. I will leave voicemails where necessary if a phone call isn’t answered but my messages will not include any personal or identifying information. As part of my follow-up care I will speak to either primary carer (parent) on the phone unless it is specifically stated by the mother that I am only to talk to her. Any online consultations I provide are carried out in a private area and are not recorded. 

Your rights in terms of data protection: 

You have the right for any information within your report to be corrected or deleted (where appropriate) and you have the right to request access to information that I keep about you or your infant. If you are not happy with the way that your data is managed then you have the right to complain. Information on your rights within Data Protection including access to your records and how to make complaints can be found at: https://ico.org.uk/