Privacy Statement

Who we are
Alliance Healthcare UK (AHUK, We) is made up of many different commercial entities (including Alliance Healthcare, Forte Pharma, Alloga UK, Alphega, Skills in Healthcare, OTC Direct, North West Ostomy Supplies and Alcura UK). We’ll let you know which you have a relationship with, when you take out a product or service with us. This policy covers all of these different entities.

You can find out more about us at www.alliance-healthcare.co.uk.

How the law protects you
Your privacy is protected by law. This section explains how that works. Data Protection Law states that we are allowed to use personal information if we have a legitimate reason to do so. This includes sharing it outside AHUK. The law states we must have one or more of these reasons:

Processing is necessary for the performance of a contract that we have with you, or
is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation, or
is necessary for the purposes of a legitimate interest, or
Is necessary in order to protect the vital interest of the data subject, or
you have given your consent, or A legitimate interest is when we have a business or commercial reason to use your information. But even then, it must not unfairly go against what is right and best for you. If we rely on our legitimate interest, we will tell you what that is.

Here is a list of the ways that we may use your personal information and the reasons for doing so..

What we use your personal information for:

Our purposes:

To manage our relationship with you or your business.
To develop new ways to meet our customers’ needs and to grow our business.
To develop and carry out marketing activities.
To study how our customers use products and services from us and other organisations.
To provide advice or guidance about our products and services.
Managing your records, working out which of our products and services may interest you and telling you about them.
Designing products and services, and deciding what we charge for them.
Defining types of customers for new products or services.
Seeking your consent when we need it to contact you.
Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal duties.
To develop and manage our brands, products and services.
To manage how we work with other companies that provide services to us and our customers.
Developing products and services, and what we charge for them.
Defining types of customers for new products or services.
Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual duties.
To deliver products and services.
To make and manage payments.
To collect and recover money that is owed to us.
Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual duties.
Complying with regulations that apply to us.
To detect, investigate, report, and seek to prevent crime.
To manage risk for us and our customers.
To obey laws and regulations that apply to us.
To respond to complaints and seek to resolve them.
Developing and improving how we deal with crime, as well as doing our legal duties in this respect
Complying with regulations that apply to us.
Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual duties.
To run our business in an efficient and proper way. This includes managing our financial position, business capability, planning, communications, corporate governance, and audit.
Complying with regulations that apply to us.
Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual duties.
To exercise our rights set out in agreements or contracts.

Groups of Personal Information

We use many different kinds of personal information, and group them together like this.

Type of personal information

Description

Personal

Basic information, such as your name (including title), the company you work for, your title or position and your relationship to a person

Financial

Your financial situation, status and history.

Contact

Your address details and how to contact you such as your postal address, email address and phone number(s).

Transactional

Details about payments to and from your accounts with us.

Contractual

Details about the products or services we provide to you.

Behavioural

Details about how you use our products and services.

Technical

Details on the devices and technology you use, your visits to our website or applications or materials and communications we send to you electronically.

Communications

Details we may gather about you from letters, emails and conversations between us, for example customer service recordings.

Open Data and Public Records

Details about you that are in public records, such as the Electoral Register, and information about you that is openly available on the internet.

Usage Data

Other data about how you use our products and services.

Documentary Data

Details about you that are stored in documents in different formats, or copies of them. This could include things like PPA statements, or Controlled Drugs License,taken for account opening purposes, utility statements or your passport if required for identity verification.

Special types of data

The law and other regulations treat some types of personal information as special. We will only collect and use these types of data if the law allows us to do so:

Racial or ethnic origin
Religious or philosophical beliefs
Trade union membership
Genetic and bio-metric data
Health data including gender
Criminal convictions and offences

Consents
Any permissions, consents or preferences that you give us. This includes things like how you want us to contact you, whether you get paper statements, or prefer large-print formats.
National Identifier

A number or code given to you by a government to identify who you are, such as a National Insurance number.

Where we collect personal information from
We may collect personal information about you (or your business) from other companies within the Alliance Healthcare UK from you, or from third parties who we use to help us provide our products and services.

Data we collect from you comes from a variety of sources:

When you apply for our products and services
When you talk to us on the phone or in conversations with our staff
When you use our web services
In emails and letters
In customer surveys
If you take part in our competitions or promotions.
Data from third parties we work with
Companies that introduce you to us
Credit reference agencies
Public information sources such as General Pharmaceutical Council
Organisations working on our behalf
Market researchers

Whom we share your personal information with
We may share your personal information with companies within AHUK and certain trusted organisations in accordance with contractual obligations in place with them, including:

Companies that we introduce you to
Companies you ask us to share your data with.
Market research companies
Agents and advisers who we use to help run your accounts and services, collect what you owe, and explore new ways of doing business
Fraud prevention agencies
Companies we have a joint venture or agreement to co-operate with
Credit reference agencies
IT service providers to our companies, and suppliers to whom we subcontract certain support services.

We may also share your information with Regulators and other government authorities if required to do so by legal or statutory requirement.

In some situations, we may need to share your personal information with other organisations to provide you with the products or services you have chosen.

If you choose not to give personal information
In some circumstances, it may be required by law, or our terms of contract we have with you, that we collect and process personal information. If you don’t wish to share this information with us, we may not be able to provide you our products or services.

Any data collection that is required will be made clear at the point of collection.

Marketing
If you consent we may use your personal information to provide you information that we think will be useful to you, or to your business.

The personal information we have for you is made up of what you tell us and data we collect when you use our services, or from third parties we work with.
We analyse this information in order to determine what you may want, need, or what may be of interest to you. This way we are able to work out which products, services and offers may be relevant for you or your business.

You can ask us to stop sending you marketing messages at any time, but we will continue sending you statements, and other important information such as changes to services that you currently use.

We may ask you to confirm your choices and accuracy of our records, if you purchase different products or new services with us in future. We will also ask you to do this if there are changes in the law, regulation, or the structure of our business.

If you change your mind you can update your choices at any time by contacting us using details provided further in this document.

How we protect your personal information
We use a variety of technical and organisational measures to help protect your personal information from unauthorised access, use, disclosure, alteration or destruction consistent with applicable data protection laws.

How long we retain your personal information
We will keep your personal information in accordance with our data retention policy for as long as your relationship with Alliance Healthcare UK continues, or we need to keep your details to manage our relationship with you.

After you stop being a customer or having a commercial relationship with Alliance Healthcare UK, we may keep your data for one of these reasons:

To respond to any questions or complaints.
To show that we treated you fairly.
To maintain records according to rules that apply to our business.

We may keep your data for 10 years or longer for legal, regulatory or technical reasons.

Accessing your personal information
You can access your personal information we hold by writing to us at: privacy@alliance-healthcare.co.uk, or at: Privacy Team, Alliance Healthcare (Distribution) Ltd, 43 Cox Lane, Chessington, KT9 1SN.

Letting us know if your personal information is incorrect

You have the right to question any information we have about you that you think is wrong or incomplete. Please contact us if you want to do this. If you do, we will take reasonable steps to check its accuracy and correct it.

What if you want us to stop using your personal information?
If you disagree with our use of your personal information, you have the right to object to it. This is known as the ‘right to object’ and ‘right to erasure’, or the ‘right to be forgotten’.

Those rights are not absolute and there may be legal or other reasons why we need to keep or process your data. Nevertheless, please tell us if you think that we should not be using it.

We may sometimes be able to restrict the use of your data. This means that it can only be used for certain things, such as legal claims or to exercise legal rights. In this situation, we would not use or share your information in other ways while it is restricted.

You can ask us to restrict the use of your personal information if:

It has been used unlawfully but you don’t want us to delete it.
It not relevant any more, but you want us to keep it for use in legal claims.
You have already asked us to stop using your data but you are waiting for us to tell you if we are allowed to keep on using it.
If you want to object to how we use your data, or ask us to delete it or restrict how we use it or, please contact us.

Withdrawing your consent
You can withdraw your consent for us to hold your personal data at any time. Please contact us if you want to do so. We will respect that choice in accordance with our legal obligations.

Changes in law
We will update this notice in order to reflect any changes in law. In some cases, we may contact you to inform you of this fact.

Contacting us
Questions, comments and requests regarding this privacy policy are welcomed and should be addressed to:

Address
Privacy Team
Alliance Healthcare (Distribution) Ltd
43 Cox Lane
Chessington
KT9 1SN
Telephone: 020 8391 2323
Email: privacy@alliance-healthcare.co.uk