This is the privacy statement for the Grief Support and Education Charitable Trust (trading as "Grief Centre") ("we", "us", "our").
We are a charitable entity registered in New Zealand under the Charities Act 2005. We offer loss and grief support to youth, adults, families or whānau experiencing any form of significant loss. We also provide professional training, community talks and events, and have partnerships with funeral homes to provide bereavement support. We have contracts with and/or accept referrals from a range of private, Government, and NGO organisations to provide our services to more people. Our main premises is based in Birkenhead, Auckland, but we also provide support across New Zealand and Australia.
At the Grief Centre, we take your privacy seriously and we are committed to protecting your personal information. The Privacy Act 2020 (Act) requires us – like any other New Zealand agency – to tell you certain things about the personal information we need to carry out our functions.
This Privacy Policy describes how we collect and hold your personal information, how we deal with your personal information, who we disclose it to, and how you can access the personal information we hold about you, in accordance with the Act and where applicable, the Health Information Privacy Code 2020 (Code).
We collect, hold, use, and disclose personal information about you in the course of providing our services. You can choose to withhold personal information, but this may restrict the range, and impact the quality of services we can provide to you. If you have any questions about our collection, storage, use or disclosure of your personal information you can contact us as set out below.
Collection of Personal Information
We may collect information about you:
from you when you provide that information to us, from example, through any contact you have with us (e.g. telephone call, email or in person), when you enquire about our services, or use our services;
from third parties, where you have authorised this (or where your representative has authorised this on your behalf, if you are unable to give your authority), or if it is otherwise necessary to provide our services to you, including for example from friends or family members, funeral homes, hospitals or hospice care, your general practitioner, mental health/support workers or others who refer you to us or whom we need to contact in the course of providing our services;
from publicly available information; or otherwise as permitted by law.
When you provide us with your personal information, you are consenting to our use of such information and our right to disclose it to third parties to the extent required as part of our services.
Personal Information we collect and hold
Depending on your interactions with us, the types of personal information that we may collect, and hold, include:
your name, date of birth, and contact information such as your address, email address, phone number, and emergency contact details;
information about your medical history which is relevant to us providing our services to you;
information regarding the relationships with your family, friends and / or information in respect to your relationship with someone who is now deceased which helps us to provide better services to you;
any additional information you provide, such as when you contact us, or when you register with us;
consultation notes/records of our meetings with you;
a record of any queries you have made or communications you have with us;
payment information; and
any other information that you authorise us to collect.
We may also collect other information when you use and access our website or social media pages which is not necessarily personal information, including your IP address, cookies, and information about your device, browser and operating system.
Storage of Personal Information
We will take reasonable steps (both by using technical methods and internal process controls and policies) to protect and keep secure the personal information we hold, however, no method is completely secure.
We hold personal information in various formats, including electronic and physical forms, on servers, cloud-based storage (such as Microsoft Onedrive, Microsoft Office 365 applications and the Monday.com CRM), databases, and filing systems.
We may need to provide personal information to a third party operating outside of New Zealand for the purposes of storage or processing of personal information. Where we provide personal information to these third parties for the purposes of storage or processing, they will be treated as an agent of us in accordance with the Act and we may be accountable for that agent's compliance with the relevant provisions and/or key Privacy Principles of the Act in relation to that personal information.
We also have internal policies, including restricted view access, password protection and locked cabinets, that control which staff members can see your personal information and what they’re allowed to do with it.
Personal information collected and stored by us will be held for only as long as necessary to achieve the purposes for which we collected the personal information, and otherwise as required by law. Subject to certain exceptions, we are required to hold health information for 10 years under the Health (Retention of Health Information) Regulations 1996 from the last time we provided services to you. After such time, we will arrange for the secure destruction of your personal information, either via shredding, permanent deletion or an external secure destruction service.
Use of Personal Information
We may use personal information for the following purposes:
to process, assess or acknowledge, any request for services you have made with us;
to provide our services and to communicate with you, or those you (or your representative if you are unable) have authorised us to communicate with, regarding such services;
to respond and follow up on any queries, complaints or requests you might have made;
to collect or recover any payments or other amounts from you;
to market our products and services including future products and services which we believe may be of interest to you including by email, unless you tell us not to as detailed below under “Marketing and Opting Out”;
to train our staff, and to monitor and maintain our systems and networks, and improve our services;
for our internal purposes such as risk management and billing;
to undertake market research related to our product and services or future products and services for the benefit of our customers;
to conduct research and develop resources, guidance and training around grief and bereavement support (noting that we will anonymise information before it is shared with any third party for these purposes);
to comply with our obligations under any laws in New Zealand, which includes tax and accounting records;
to share your personal information with third parties where you (or your representative if you are unable) have consented for that information to be shared with them;
to share your personal information with third parties (with or without your prior consent) if such disclosure is in our opinion necessary to prevent or lessen a serious threat to the life or health of your or another; and
any other purpose you (or your representative if you are unable) have consented to or have authorised.
Disclosure
Generally, we do not disclose personal information to third parties for them to use for their own purposes. We may, however, disclose your personal information:
to the advisers, consultants, data storage service providers, other service providers and contractors we ordinarily engage in the course of providing our services (such as insurers, professional advisors, and other such service providers);
to other service providers involved in the provision of our services to you including other counsellors, your general practitioner or other health care providers;
to your parent, guardian, authorised representative or family member, where you have authorised this or where it is necessary to ensure the safety and wellbeing of you or others;
to the Police or other emergency services providers if we consider that this is necessary to keep you or others safe;
to any person where disclosure is required or authorised by law; and
to any other person or entity to whom you (or your representative if you are unable) have consented us to disclose your personal information.
In general, the third-party providers we use will only collect, use, and disclose your information to the extent necessary to allow them to perform the services they provide to us or to keep you or others safe and well.
Access or Correcting Your Personal Information
Subject to certain grounds for refusal set out in the Act, you have the right to request access to any of your readily retrievable personal information we hold about you. Where we hold information that you are entitled to access, we will endeavour to provide you with a suitable range of choices as to how access is provided (e.g. emailing or mailing it to you).
You can request access to or correct your personal information by contacting us at the address below.
When you contact us, you should provide evidence of who you are and set out the details of your request (e.g. the personal information, or the correction, that you are requesting).
If the information held by us is incorrect, inaccurate, incomplete, or not up to date, then you may ask us to correct the information and we will either correct the information or make a record of your comment, as we think appropriate.
Third Party Partners and Analytics
We may also collect information about you when you visit our website or social media pages. We promote our services on our websites and on social media. Third party vendors, including Google, show our advertisements on sites throughout the internet. Both we and these vendors may use cookies, separate to those required to maintain secure connections, to assist in serving the most relevant available Grief Centre advertisements to you based on your prior visits to our websites. You do not need to accept these cookies to interact with us and you can opt out of the use of cookies by adjusting your browser settings.
Throughout our public websites, the Google Analytics system is used to measure anonymised site activity, associating multiple sessions across multiple devices. The information generated by these cookies (which includes your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored on the servers belonging to the companies providing us with analytic services. These agencies may also transfer information gathered in this way to their agents or to other entities as required by law.
We also use other tools to better target advertising and our communications with you.
By using any of our websites you consent to the processing of data about you as explained above.
Links to other websites
Our website may contain links to other websites. These websites have their own privacy policies and we have no responsibility for linked websites, or their communication with you, and provide them solely for your information and convenience. We suggest you review that site’s privacy policy before you provide personal information.
Marketing, Research and Opting Out
We may contact you from time to time with marketing material about our other products or services, or with research-based surveys. You may opt out of receiving this material at any time by contacting us at the address below.
Your consent to receive this information will remain current until you advise us otherwise.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
From time to time, we may need to amend the terms of this Privacy Policy if our practices, or the law, change. We reserve the right to change this Privacy Policy at any time. If we do so, we will post the updated version on our website.
Applicable law
This Privacy Policy is governed by New Zealand law. Your personal information will be collected, used, stored, and disclosed in accordance with this Privacy Policy and New Zealand law. The courts of New Zealand have non-exclusive jurisdiction.
This Privacy Policy does not limit or exclude any of your rights under the Act or the Code. If you wish to seek further information on the Act and Code, see www.privacy.org.nz and www.privacy.org.nz/privacy-act-2020/codes-of-practice/hipc2020/
Privacy Concerns, Questions or Complaints
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy and/or our handling of personal information or you believe that we have at any time failed to keep one of our commitments to you to handle your personal information in the manner required by the Privacy Act or the Code, please lodge a written complaint addressed to our Privacy Officer using the contact details below:
Katrina King, Privacy Officer
Grief Centre
PO Box 34548
Birkenhead
Auckland 0746
Email: privacy@griefcentre.org.nz
Telephone: 0800 331 333
Once we receive your complaint, we will respond to you within the applicable time periods provided in the Act and Code.
We will respond and advise whether we agree with your complaint. If we do not agree, we will provide reasons. If we do agree, we will advise what (if any) action we consider appropriate to take in response. We may also advise you that we need further time to consider your request, and if so, the reasons why. If you are still not satisfied after having contacted us and given us a reasonable time to respond, then we suggest that you contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at:
Phone: 0800 803 909 (from 8.30am to 5pm, Monday to Friday) (04) 474 7595
Post: PO Box 10-094. The Terrace, Wellington, 6143
Email: enquiries@privacy.org.nz
This policy was last modified on 25 January 2024.
