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Thames Street Dental is GDPR Compliant

Thames Street Dental is GDPR Compliant

Since being established in 1985, Thames Street Dental has earned the trust of our patients and is renowned as one of the best dentists in Kingston. In order to ensure that we keep that trust, we regularly review our policies and practices throughout the business to ensure that we are providing our patients with the best possible care and service.

In support of changes to European Union (EU) data protection laws (in particular the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) being introduced on 25th May 2018), Thames Street Dental recently completed a review of all of our operations to look at how we store, process and use the personal information of our website visitors and registered patients.  Fortunately, our policies were already well defined, but some changes were necessary in light of GDPR. This blog post outlines provides some further information about GDPR and the changes we have made to ensure your data is sufficiently protected.

What is the GDPR?

In summary, the GDPR introduces the need for organisations to be more accountable in the way that they collect, use, store and dispose of personal information. It also gives individuals more control over their personal information.  The main principles of GDPR are to ensure that data is:

1. Used lawfully, fairly and in a transparent way
2. Collected only for valid purposes that we have clearly explained to you and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes
3. Relevant to the purposes we have told you about and limited only to those purposes
4. Accurate and kept up to date
5. Stored only as long as necessary for the purposes we have told you about
6. Stored securely

What does this mean for you?

During this review, we updated some of our policies, and created some additional ones. Many of these changes have happened behind the scenes, and may not be noticed by visitors of our website or by our patients.  There are, however some changes which change the way we operate, and for which we require co-operation from our patients. Therefore, we wanted to make you aware of these new changes (don’t worry, the quality of the service and care we provide to you will not change!):

Changes to our Website

In order to comply with the GDPR, we have made the following changes to our website:

• Audited all third party components, and removed any unnecessary components and those components which may collect your personal data for a third party (with the exception of Google Analytics, as outlined in our Privacy Policy)
• Updated our website to include a new GDPR-compliant cookie notice, and the option to reject cookies from being stored on your device
• Updated our website Privacy Policy to include information about what personal information we, our website, and our trusted processing partners collect, and how to opt out of that data collection, and more

Changes to our Operations

As mentioned above, GDPR has meant that we have to change some of our processes and the way we operate so that we can continue to offer you the same great service and care and still comply with GDPR – some of those changes have been highlighted below:

• We request that all of our patients (new and existing) review our Privacy Notice for Patients (available in the practice) and complete a new consent form (or alternatively a new Patient Registration and Medical History Form)
• We have appointed a Data Protection Officer (DPO) who is in charge of all data protection related matters and can be contacted through the usual channels, including through our website using the contact page.

We appreciate your co-operation with these changes, and as always, welcome any feedback you may have.

Thames Street Dental