Student support and wellbeing privacy notice

Introduction

This notice applies to disability and wellbeing services given to students, applicants and other clients, by us, the University of the West of England. We will process your data in accordance with applicable data protection legislation. The data controller is the University of the West of England.

Your personal information

We will process your non-sensitive personal and sensitive personal data that you or others (for example your doctor or funding body) give us. This will include information about your physical and mental health. You are not required to give us your personal data, but if you limit the data you give us it will limit the service we can give you.

Using your personal information

We will only use your personal data for the purposes of:

  • creating a record to store your data
  • arranging Reasonable Adjustments for you, including giving you disability advice
  • giving you counselling, mental health support or specialist mentoring
  • helping you with your fitness to learn or practice
  • responding to any complaints you make about our services
  • monitoring, evaluating, auditing and developing our services.

The legal grounds we use to process your data will include:

  • your explicit consent
  • protecting you or others from serious risks of harm
  • meeting our legal obligations, or other grounds of substantial public interest
  • pursuing our legitimate interests (eg upholding UWE Bristol regulations).

We do not use automated decision making within disability and wellbeing services. We will keep your data for six years after the end of the academic year in which you last used our Disability and Wellbeing Services, after which it will be confidentially destroyed.

Sharing your personal information

We will only share relevant items of your information where it is necessary to fulfil the purposes listed above. We will also aim to do this with your consent and in discussion with you first. Sharing will also follow professional ethical guidelines. Recipients of your personal data may include:

  • academic and professional services staff (eg student support advisers, accommodation staff, wellbeing practitioners, mentors, study needs assessors, disability support staff)
  • your UWE Bristol programme leader, for example if your programme requires placement or work experience activities, and you have a condition or other factor that impacts on your practice.
  • your doctor and relevant NHS services
  • in the event of an emergency, your emergency contact (if you have given us one).

UWE Bristol takes the protection of your personal data very seriously and takes appropriate steps to ensure your personal data is stored in a secure environment to prevent any unauthorised access. We will not share your personal data with third parties (eg law enforcement agencies) without your consent unless legally required or permitted to do so. This will only happen in very limited circumstances where there is substantial risk to you or others. We will not transfer your personal data outside the UK or European Economic Area without your consent unless safeguards are in place.

Your rights and choices

In respect of your personal data held by us, you have the following qualified rights to:

  • access it and receive it in a structured machine readable format
  • rectify it if it is not accurate or complete
  • erase it, for example by removing your consent
  • restrict or objecting to its processing
  • object to automated decision making and profiling, and
  • complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

To exercise any of your rights please contact the Data Protection Officer.

How to contact us

  • For data protection queries, please write to the Data Controller, UWE Bristol, Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol, BS16 1QY, or email dataprotection@uwe.ac.uk.
  • If you have a complaint, please refer to complaints at UWE Bristol.