Privacy notice for online surveys

This privacy notice explains how the personal information you supply when you complete our online surveys will be used and your legal rights in relation to your information.

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This website

The purpose of this website is to facilitate the completion of online surveys about the experiences of patients, service users and staff of hospitals and other organisations in the healthcare and social care sectors.

Picker Institute Europe (“Picker”) are specialists in patient and healthcare staff experience surveys and are contracted to carry out surveys of this nature for a variety of NHS trusts and other organisations.

For the avoidance of doubt, you are under no statutory or contractual requirement to use this website or to provide personal information when using it. Nor is your use of this website a requirement to enter into a contract with either Picker or the Survey Organiser.

Picker’s role

Picker collects and processes personal information you submit in completing this survey on behalf of the relevant NHS trust or other organisation conducting the survey (the “Survey Organiser“) which will have been notified to you in the documentation provided or via a web link.

Picker only processes personal information on behalf of the Survey Organiser in accordance with our agreement with them and on their instructions. As a consequence, under data protection laws:

• Picker is classified as a data processor for personal information submitted by you in relation to the survey; and
• the Survey Organiser is classified as the data controller of that personal information and any questions or issues relating to this survey or the use of your personal information should be directed to the Survey Organiser in the first instance.

How we use your personal information

Picker uses the information submitted by you in completing the survey to produce anonymised results about your health and/or social care experience. We report the results as anonymised statistics. Where you have been asked to provide comments, these will not be identified as belonging to you, instead they will be combined with those gathered from other survey participants, and will be analysed as part of a group.

Picker provides these anonymised results to its clients which are then often shared more widely, such as with hospitals or other health care providers, to help them gain a better understanding of what is working well and identify areas that may need improvement.

If we ask you for personal information that enables you to be identified – e.g. your name, ID numbers, e-mail address or telephone number, we will clearly state why we are asking for it and for your permission to use it for that purpose. For example, it might be to inform the winner of a prize draw or to contact you for follow-up research.

Picker does not share your personal information collected using this website with any third party or transfer your personal data outside the UK and the European Economic Area.

This website adopts a proactive approach to helping protect your privacy by using a secure connection and encrypting your information to prevent unauthorised access.

All survey responses are treated in the strictest confidence and will be anonymised for inclusion in reports to our clients and any personal information is securely destroyed and deleted from our systems when it is no longer required for the purposes of the survey. The retention period is based on our contractual obligations with the Survey Organiser; this is usually six months following the completion of the survey.

Picker is registered with the Information Commissioners Office (Z4942556) and complies with UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. We also have UKAS accredited certification for our information security management system (ISO 27001:2013) from SGS as well as ISO 20252:2019 (Market, opinion and social research). We are also registered on the NHS Digital Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT) under organisation code 8HV74. We also have the Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation.

What personal information we use

By using this website we may receive:

• Personal information you specifically input when completing an online survey.
• Encrypted profile data such as your username and password, your preferences and feedback.
• Technical Data such as internet protocol address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access this website.
• Usage Data such as information about how you use this website.

The website uses strictly necessary cookies to authorise users and functionality cookies, including cookies to prevent a respondent from taking the same survey multiple times (where our client has enabled this feature for their survey).

You can choose whether to allow cookies or not. Allowing cookies enables you to get the best use out of our website and services. You can use your web browser’s settings to manage cookies, for example to delete existing cookies, to prevent your browser from accepting new cookies or to disable cookies altogether. However, this may affect your ability to use parts of our website and our services.

Our survey platform is hosted by Qualtrics Ltd and uses their cookies. You can find out more about the cookies they use at the link below – https://www.qualtrics.com/cookie-statement/

Qualtrics uses the Google Translate API to translate text comments added as part of a survey response. You should be aware that if you add personal information in a text comment that this information may be shared with and processed by Google Translate. Whilst this information is likely to be processed within the European Economic Area, on occasion, it may be that it is processed outside of this region.

Your legal rights

You have a number of important rights under data protection laws which you can exercise free of charge by contacting the Survey Organiser. In summary, those include rights to:

• withdraw any consent you may have given to the processing of your personal information
• access to your personal information and to certain other supplementary information
• require any mistakes in your personal information to be corrected
• require the erasure of personal information concerning you in certain situations
• receive copies of your personal information and the right to transmit that information to a third party in certain situations
• object in certain other situations to the continued processing of your personal information
• otherwise restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.

For further information on each of those rights, including the circumstances in which they apply, see the Guidance issued by the ICO on individual’s rights under the General Data Protection Regulation.

If you would like to exercise any of the above rights you should contact the Survey Organiser.

You also have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Survey Organiser, to Picker or to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk).