Support line confidentiality statement

Disclaimer

The Marie Curie Support Line team are not medically trained and we are therefore unable to provide medical information or advice. We recommend you check with your local medical professional if you have any questions or concerns.

Full confidentiality statement

The Marie Curie Support Line is a free service which offers a space to talk about how you're feeling, and also to find out practical and clinical information about living with a terminal illness.

The service is confidential, whether you contact us by phone or in writing (including web chat, social media and email or letter), though there are some specific occasions where we may need to break that confidentiality (these are listed below).

We won’t share your data with anyone outside of Marie Curie and we won't use your information to send you any marketing information. The information from your enquiry is restricted to the Support Line team.

There may be some occasions where we have to share your specific information with another team (such as our nursing team) but we'll let you know if we need to do this. This would usually be when you ask for help or information from another part of our organisation.

Information we collect, why we collect it, and where it's stored

We maintain a secure database which only Support Line staff can access. The database contains anonymised details of your contact with us (which will be either by phone, email or online chat), your age, and the first part of your postcode.

We collect anonymised details of your enquiry to help us understand how effective our service is, who we're reaching, and how we can support more people.

We collect your age and the first part of your postcode in order to help us understand who we're reaching and where. This information is not used for any other purpose.

If you give us your name or address, for example if you ask us to send you information by post, your name and address will be stored on a separate database (only accessible to Support Line staff) which is not linked on our main database, so the details of your enquiry remain anonymous.

When you call us, anonymised details of your conversation with us will be entered into our main database. Your call will be recorded to monitor the quality of our service and support the training of our staff.

Unless you withhold your telephone number, it'll be stored in our call recording system and linked to the recording of your call. 

Our call recording system is separate to our main database and isn't linked with the anonymised details of your call.

We won't use your number to contact you and we won't pass your number to anyone else unless confidentiality must be broken (in the exceptions to the policy stated below).

When you email us, we'll only use your email address for the purpose of responding to you.

When you use our online chat function, anonymised details of your conversation with us will be entered into our main database. We maintain a separate database of online chats where a transcript of each chat is stored along with your IP address. This database is not linked to our main anonymised database.

Where you contact us using social media and we reply, we won't delete your posts, unless the content posted is offensive or inappropriate. It is your responsibility to remove any posts that you no longer want in the public domain.

We may ask you for feedback on our service to use for quality purposes and to help us demonstrate impact. The full recorded feedback will be deleted within three months; some comments and quotes may be retained for longer to use internally.

We'll only use your feedback for external communications with express consent .

How long we keep your information for

• If you give us any personal data – name, number, address – it'll be deleted after one month.
• If you contact us by phone, your phone number and the recording of your call will be deleted after one month. Any voicemails you leave us will also be deleted after one month.
• If you contact us by email your email and email address will be deleted after one month.
• If you contact us by online chat your transcript and IP address will be deleted after three months.

Who can access your information?

Only Support Line staff at Marie Curie can access the information you give us. We won't share your information unless there is a reason to break confidentiality, as listed below.

Occasions where we would break confidentiality

There are times where we'll need to break this confidentiality agreement; the following are such occasions, though this is not an exhaustive list:

• Where information of terrorism, money laundering or a bomb threat is disclosed to us
• If we receive a court order or in order to comply with our legal obligations to share information
• If we become aware, hear about or suspect that abuse/harm may have taken place or may occur in relation to any adult or child
• In the event that our staff or service is abused
• If we believe someone is taking steps to end their life.

If appropriate, we will inform you that we're going to do this.

For further information about how we use your personal information, please see our Privacy Policy.