Privacy policy

How we will use your personal data

We use and publish personal information to support our work as the regulatory body for pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and registered pharmacies in Great Britain. Our statutory aims, objectives, powers and responsibilities are set out under the Pharmacy Order 2010, the rules made under the Order and other legislation.

Pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and pre-registration trainees

If you apply to join the register of pharmacists or pharmacy technicians, own or manage a registered pharmacy, or apply to register a pharmacy we may process your personal information for reasons including:

updating the registers
administering and maintaining your registration, including taking payments
processing and investigating complaints and concerns about pharmacies or the fitness to practise of registrants
monitoring the fitness to practise of registrants
checking that registrants have completed appropriate continuing fitness to practise development and training
compiling statistics and research

We publish certain types of personal information including:

names, registration details and fitness to practise information of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians on the GPhC registers
schedules of forthcoming fitness to practise hearings
outcomes of fitness to practise hearings

Further information is given in our publication and disclosure policy.

Providers of education and training

If you are involved in providing education or training, we may use your information in:

accrediting courses of education or training
administering the pre-registration training scheme

Raising concerns

If you raise a concern about a registrant, we will use information you give us to help us look into the matter. We will ask for consent before sharing any details of your concern with the registrant or others, but in some circumstances we may consider it is necessary to share relevant information without consent. We would do this if there is an immediate or severe risk to safety or it is otherwise in the public interest. Further information is given in the concerns form and the publication and disclosure policy.

Responding to consultations

If you respond to a GPhC consultation, we will use your response in reviewing our proposals and to compile a report on the findings of the consultation. Further information is given in each consultation document.

Applying to work with the GPhC

If you apply for a job with us, or to be an associate, partner or council member, we will hold your details for the purpose of processing the application, assessing candidates and, if you are successful, for administering your employment or contract for working with us. We use any information you provide on the equal opportunities monitoring form to assess whether we are attracting a diverse range of candidates.

Sharing personal data with other organisations

We will not share your personal data for marketing purposes with any third party.

We share information with other organisations in carrying out our statutory aims, objectives, powers and responsibilities under the Pharmacy Order 2010, the rules made under the Order, the Medicines Act 1968, the Poisons Act 1972 and other legislation.

Organisations we work with include other regulatory and enforcement authorities, NHS trusts, employers, the Department of Health and universities. You can find information about the formal arrangements we have with certain organisations on our website.

Further information about when we disclose information to other organisations is given in our publication and disclosure policy. We may also disclose information when required by law, for example in response to official requests from other public authorities.

We recognise the importance of having clear guidelines to follow and making sure that information is shared in a secure manner and in line with the law, including the common law duty of confidence, the Data Protection Act 1998, the Human Rights Act 1998 and other related legislation and guidance.

Register data

We make data from the public registers available to organisations that need to validate that pharmacies and pharmacy professionals are registered with the GPhC via a licensed subscription service. Further details about the service and a copy of the licence are on our website.

Statistics and research

From time to time we carry out research projects into various aspects of our work. We may use third parties to help us with this and may pass information to them so that they can contact individuals for research purposes. We make sure that any such third parties sign an agreement which includes a confidentiality clause.

We do not share contact details of registrants with independent researchers or research students. See the research policy for further information.

CCTV

We use CCTV in our offices. See our CCTV policy for further information. If you want to see any footage, details on how to request personal data are given below.

Contact from the Professionals Regulation (Fitness to Practise) team

It is our policy that all electronic correspondence containing sensitive or personal information such as registrants’ or witnesses’ addresses or medical information are password protected or encrypted to protect it. We will send paper documents of this nature by a recorded mail service.

We will ask security questions to check the identity of all callers asking about the progression of cases.

Asking to see your personal data

If you want to see personal information that we may hold about you, please send your request in writing to the Governance team, describing the information you want. It would be helpful if you could mark your email or envelope ‘Subject Access Request’.

We are allowed to charge a fee of up to £10 for sending you the information and will tell you if a charge will apply. You may be asked to supply proof of your identity.

Please contact:

Governance Team
General Pharmaceutical Council
25 Canada Square
London
E14 5LQ

Email: foi@pharmacyregulation.org

Objecting to processing

Under the Data Protection Act 1998, you have the right to object to us using your personal information in some circumstances. If you wish to make an objection, please write to us, explaining what you would like us to do:

Governance Team
General Pharmaceutical Council
25 Canada Square
London
E14 5LQ

Email: foi@pharmacyregulation.org

We may not be able to agree to all requests to stop processing personal information, but if we do not, we will explain why. For example, we are required to use certain types of information in connection with our statutory aims, objectives, powers and responsibilities under the Pharmacy Order 2010, the rules made under the Order and other legislation.

Further information

As required by the Data Protection Act 1998, the GPhC is registered as a data controller with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

You can find out more about your rights under the Data Protection Act from the ICO website.

Privacy

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device (such as your computer or mobile phone). These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.

These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:

enabling a service to recognise your device so you don't have to give the same information several times during one task
recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don't need to do it for every web page requested
measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there's enough capacity to ensure they are fast

You can manage these small files yourself and learn more about them through Internet browser cookies – what they are and how to manage them.

This is a list of cookies that may be stored on your device when visiting this website:

Name	Purpose	Expiry
.ASPXAUTH	Authentication – allows you access to the site after you sign in, and automatically logs you out 20 minutes after you stop using the site	20 minutes after your last action on the site
ASP.NET_SessionId	Identifies a user's browser session	At the end of the session (when you close your browser)
MyGphcPharmacySignIn	Identifies you while you are signed in, by using the following fields: Username Email Owner Number This information is encrypted to protect your privacy	When you close the browser or when you sign out of myGPhCPharmacy
fontSize	Remembers your preferred font size so you don't need to change it every time you visit the site	1 year
__utma	Used by Google analytics. Keeps track of the number of unique visitors to the site	2 years
__utmb	Used by Google analytics. This works with _utmc to calculate the average length of time you spend on our site	30 minutes
__utmc	Used by Google analytics. This works with _utmb to tell us when you close your browser	At the end of the session (when you close your browser)
__utmz	Used by Google analytics. This tells us how you reached the site (for example, from another website or a search engine)	6 months
testcookie	Checks if Cookies and Javascript are enabled in a browser as there are parts of myGPhCpharmacy that require these to function	When you sign in to myGPhCpharmacy