Privacy Policy

Privacy of personal information is important to The Summit Centre. We are committed to respecting privacy and following the requirements of applicable privacy legislation.

Why is Personal Information Collected, Used and Disclosed? To provide the best care possible to those we serve.

We collect personal information:

• usually with the knowledge and consent of the individual;
• occasionally from publicly available sources, such as the telephone directory, Facebook or the internet.

See the sections on Clients and Families; and Employees, Contract Staff, Volunteers and Students for details about the personal information that we collect, use and disclose for each relationship.

What We Do To Protect Privacy

We have policies and procedures to protect personal information from theft, loss, unauthorized use, disclosure, copying, modification and disposal.

We educate our staff about these policies and procedures and monitor compliance on a regular basis.

Current policies and procedures include: locked building, sign-in procedure, locked filing cabinets; computer firewalls, passwords, encryption on jump drives and mobile devices, written consents in certain contexts, and confidentiality agreements.

Your Control Over Your Personal Information

You can access or correct your personal information. You can withdraw your consent for the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information, subject only to the law.

Please Contact Us if you have any concerns about privacy or you wish for more information.

The Summit Centre for Preschool Children with Autism

940 Prince Road, Windsor, Ontario N9C 2Z5 Phone (519) 255-1195

E-mail: info@summitcentre.org Attention: Privacy Officer

You have the right to complain about any violation of your privacy rights to;

Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner

2 Bloor Street East, Suite 1400 Toronto, ON M4W 1A8 Phone: 1-800-387-0073 or 416-326-3333

Email: info@ipc.on.ca Web http://www.ipc.on.ca

Information and Privacy Commissioner of Canada

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada is an advocate for the privacy rights of Canadians.

112 Kent Street, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 1H3 Phone: 1-800-282-1376 or 613-995-8210 Web www.privcom.gc.ca

Clients and Families

Our clients include preschool children and their families who are on our waitlist, our contact list, and people who receive services from us including workshops, assessments, support groups, treatment, and training. We collect more or less personal information as needed. For example, more for children and families who receive intensive treatment services for long periods of time and less for people who only attend workshops.

Purposes. We collect, use and disclose personal information about our clients and their families or legal guardians, to:

• Put prospective clients on our contact list and waitlist
• Assess clients' needs and advise about treatment options.
• Deliver safe and effective intensive behaviour intervention and other treatment services.
• Communicate and follow-up with client's families, and with other care providers.
• Contact clients, invoice for services, obtain funding and for fundraising.
• Conduct clinical research and statistics.
• Plan, administer and evaluate our practices.
• Provide workshops and teaching opportunities.
• People of events at the Centre or in the community, or opportunities to participate in research.
• Send general informational email to clients' families who give express consent to email.
• Fulfil our legal obligations or other purposes permitted by law.

Collection

We collect personal information from clients and families directly through our intake process, assessments, workshops and treatment. We ask for verbal consent to collect this information when someone first phones us. We also collect personal information from other persons involved in providing services. We collect a range from basic contact information to more sensitive personal health information.

Disclosure

We disclose personal information about clients and families as needed with other persons providing services or supplying related equipment; students in training at our centre, regulators such as The College of Psychologists of Ontario, funders, researchers as part of approved studies; and people who we engage to provide us with services. We do not disclose personal information with any other persons unless required for law enforcement or otherwise provided by law. We will notify client's families if any personal information in our custody is stolen, lost, or accessed by unauthorized persons.

Employees, Contract Staff, Volunteers, and Students

Purposes. We collect personal information for employees, people who are contracted to do work for us (e.g., temporary workers), as well as volunteers and students to contact them for necessary work or training related communication, and for the safety of our clients.

Collection

We may collect personal information such as; name, home contact information, employment history, references, work performance data, and police clearance.

Disclosure. We disclose personal information about employees, contract staff, volunteers and students only with people who we engage to provide us with services such as legal counsel, but only on an as needed basis. We otherwise do not disclose, give, sell or transfer any personal information about our employees, volunteers and other care providers unless required for law enforcement or otherwise provided for by law. If employees, contract staff, volunteers or students request a letter of reference or an evaluation, we collect information about their work related performance and provide a report as authorized by them.

Limits to Confidentiality

There are limits to confidentiality in rare circumstances, such as:

• When there are suspicions of child abuse or neglect, we are required to immediately report this to the Children's Aid Society;
• If we learn that another health care provider (e.g. dentist, physician, chiropractor, etc.) has sexually abused a patient, we must report it to the relevant professional regulatory body;
• If we were to learn that a client is intending to harm themselves or another person, we must take reasonable steps to prevent harm;
• In response to court orders and subpoenas, we must release our records to the court.

Retention and Destruction of Personal Information

We need to retain personal information for some time so that we can answer questions you might have about the services provided and for our own accountability to external regulatory bodies. As required by the College of Psychologists of Ontario, we keep our client files for at least 10 years past the clients' 18th birthday.

We destroy paper documents containing personal information by shredding. We destroy electronic information by deleting it. When hardware is discarded, the hard drive is physically destroyed.

What is Personal Information?

Personal information is information about an identifiable individual. Personal information includes information that relates to: an individual's personal characteristics (e.g., gender, age, income, home address or phone number); health (e.g., health history, health services received); or activities and views (e.g., opinions expressed by an individual, an opinion or evaluation of an individual).

Personal information is different from business information (e.g., an individual's business address and telephone number). This is not protected by privacy legislation.

About Us

The Summit Centre includes, at the time of this writing, a Board of Directors, a Clinical Director, an Executive Director, Senior Therapists, a Program Secretary, and Behaviour Therapists. We use consultants and agencies that may, for their duties, have limited access to personal information we hold. These include maintenance staff, bookkeeping staff, psychological consultants, and computer consultants. They assure us that they follow appropriate privacy and confidentiality principles.