Privacy notice for children and young people using Barnardos Guardian ad Litem Service.
Ask your Barnardos Guardian ad Litem to help you with any parts of this information you find hard, and they will be happy to help you.
Download our child-friendly Guardian ad Litem Privacy NoticeBarnardos is a charity that works with children, young people and their families.
Our office is in Dublin. Its address is:
Barnardos National Office
4 Christchurch Square
Dublin 8
DO8 DT63
You can contact us by email at: [email protected] or phone us at call save 1850 222 300
Our charity registration number is 20010027.
This information is called a ‘Privacy Notice’. We know you might be worried about your privacy and telling us things when you work with us, and that is why we have written this. We hope that it will help you to understand what we do to protect your privacy. We are always careful with your information, and we only share it when we have to.About the Barnardos Guardia ad Litem Service and your privacy
The Barnardos Guardian ad Litem service is a service for:
We call the person who works for you directly a Guardian ad Litem – Latin words – or Guardian for short.
We may use some words that might be new to you, and we have tried to explain them clearly. Please ask your Guardian any time you want us to explain words more or give you examples.
This information is set out in eight parts:
You won’t remember all of this information, so your Guardian will remind you of important bits as you work with us. You can also ask them to go through it with you again, as this will help you understand better and feel more confident.
We respect your privacy, and we work to keep your information safe and to only give it to people who need to see it. We will tell you about what people may need to see it later on.
We want to help you understand your privacy rights, so do ask us for help any time you would like it.
We want to respect your privacy. By law, you have seven privacy rights.
Personal information is information that could identify you. It includes your name, age and the date of your birthday.
We have to follow the law when we deal with your information. The data protection law is the law we have to most closely follow in our Guardian ad Litem service. It guides us about how to collect information about you in a fair way – and how we should use it fairly too.
Your Guardian keeps information about you so that they can tell the Judge in a courtroom:
The Judge says that your Guardian is allowed to ask people for this information so that the Guardian can tell the Judge about you.
Your Guardian will keep private information about you in the file. This file will include information like:
Let’s look at each of these one by one.
General information
More detailed information we keep – including documents
Special information
Your Guardian service collects information on our work with you to:
In general, only your Guardian and certain people like staff from Barnardos Guardian ad Litem service will be able to see your file. Your Guardian may discuss some of your details with a manager or supervisor. If they do, they are doing this to make sure you get the best service.
By law, we can process your personal information because:
We collect information about you from:
Information we collect from people like: | Information we get from documents like: | Information we get from what we see |
|
We keep your information for as long as you are working with your Guardian. When the Judge says that your Guardian doesn’t need to work with you any longer we store your information safely.
We have a document that tells us how long we should keep your file, how to keep it safely and how to get rid of it (we usually shred it). (This document is called the Barnardos Retention Policy. ‘Retention’ means ‘keep’.)
Sharing information in this way helps to make sure that you are properly taken care of.
Example 1:
Mary (aged 8) sees her family once a month, but Mary wants to see her family more often.
The Judge makes a court order (what the Judge says must happen) changing the number of times Mary sees her family from once a month to twice a month. The Judge made this this change as they thought this would help Mary.
In this situation, Mary’s social worker will have to tell Mary’s foster family. In this way, they will know to expect that Mary sees her family twice a month.
We may also need to share information with other people if we need to keep you or others safe.
Example 2:
If Sean (aged 14) told his Guardian that another young person in school was hurting him, then Sean’s Guardian would have to tell the social worker and school to make sure that everyone was safe.
Others like our business partners, suppliers and sub-contractors and / or when the law through the court says that we must share information with you.
Example 3:
If we are getting part of our computer system fixed, the person fixing it (called a contractor) might be able to see some of your information. We would make sure that this person took your privacy very seriously. We would make sure they signed a legal agreement about this
How we protect information about you when we have to share it.
If we share your information we always make sure we protect your personal information. Some of the ways we do this are:
Sending personal information to other countries
These rights are part of the data protection law and are called the General Data Protection Regulation – or GDPR for short. A group of countries have signed up to these laws. This group of countries are in the European Economic Area (EEA) and Ireland is one of these countries.
Sometimes, Barnardos Guardian ad Litem service might need to send your personal information to countries outside of this group of countries. This is very unusual and if we had to do this, don’t worry as we would take good care to keep it safe – and protected. We would make sure that we had special legal agreements to make sure your information is safe and you have the same rights.
For example, we always have passwords so only those we trust can open information about you. We also make sure that our email system and computer are encrypted (protected). This means nobody can get your information unless they have the right password.
Tell us about it by emailing us at: [email protected] or phone us at Call save: 1850 222 300
If you believe that Barnardos is not managing your information in a ways that respects your privacy rights, then you can complain to an outside person called Helen Dixon.
She is the head of the Data Protection Office. She is the Commissioner there. You can phone the Data Protection Office at: 0761 104800 or email them at www.dataprotection.ie
One of her staff will reply to you.
If you would like more information about our Guardian ad Litem service, please contact one of our offices.
Dublin office: Christchurch Square, Dublin 8.
Tel: (01) 453 0355 Fax: (01) 453 0300 [email protected]
Cork office: Blackmore House, Meade Street, Cork.
Tel: (021) 431 0591 Fax: (021) 431 0691 [email protected]