Reply from the College

The Data Protection Act 1998 has proven to be somewhat of a headache for us. It prevents us from posting personal information - even just a person’s name - on the website without their written permission. Since we make 400 or so updates or uploads to the website each month, the bureaucracy involved in getting specific signed forms from every person mentioned in those pages was phenomenal, and was becoming a serious impediment to keeping the site going at all. The generic consent form is our way of trying to ensure that on the one hand we comply with the Act, and on the other we keep the site usable.

The wording and the approach have been approved by the College’s solicitors.

It is our policy to keep personal data on the website to a minimum, regardless of what permissions we hold. Home addresses and details about ethnicity are specifically excluded, and will never be posted without a request from the person concerned. We would of course remove any details on request, if any member is unhappy with the use we make of the permission.

The benefit for members is straightforward: information can be placed on the website when it is needed, without several weeks’ delay for permission requests to be sent out, reminders to be sent, text to be re-edited when we can’t get hold of people, and so on. The website staff can get on with developing the site, rather than spending most of their time bothering members for permissions, which in most cases seem trivial to the people concerned. By way of example, we are now able to generate committee lists for Faculties, Divisions, etc. directly from the College’s database, and we have a routine to automatically filter out those people who haven’t signed the generic consent.

The form offers a specific opt-out for use of the data in research, analysis and other uses, and members are welcome to make use of this opt-out if they wish. Our main concern is simply to be able to make the website work.

The system is now working well. We have received consent from 7700 members, and this has reduced the administrative overhead considerably. We would like to reduce it still further, and we would encourage any members who have not yet signed their form to do so. An FAQ giving further information is available at http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/dpa.