Privacy notice - membership

Our contact details

Name: Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH)

Address: 5-11 Theobalds Road, London, WC1X 8SH

Phone number: +44 (0)20 7092 6000

Email: Data Protection Officer (for privacy/data protection enquiries only): information.governance@rcpch.ac.uk

General enquiries can be sent via our contact form or contact the relevant team directly.

Our EEA/EU and Swiss representative 

If you are located in the EEA (European Economic Area), EU (European Union) or Switzerland, you can contact DataRep if you wish to make a request under EU GDPR or the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP). For their contact details, see our website privacy policy.

If you have any concerns over how DataRep will handle the personal data they will require to undertake for their services, please refer to the DataRep privacy notice.

How will we use the information we collect about you?

You are providing the RCPCH with some of your personal data in your membership application and you will continue to provide us with subsequent information about yourself for many different purposes throughout your relationship with the College.

The College undertakes to look after this data with care and in accordance with UK data protection legislation which is currently UK GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in conjunction with the Data Protection Act 2018.

We will process your information in accordance with one of the following data protection legal grounds:

• Where necessary for performance of a contract with you or with a view to entering into a contract with you for your membership
• Where necessary in our legitimate interests as a charity, membership organisation and royal medical college
• Where we have your consent
• Where there is a substantial public interest with a clear basis in law (special category data)

As part of our contract with you, we will process your personal data for the following purposes:

• To process your application for membership and, if you are successful, to administer your membership subscription. This will include emailing you with annual membership renewal and fee reminders; sharing information across RCPCH departments to improve our communications and services; or to verify qualifications and to maintain and administer our membership database. We may also contact you to verify your membership status. 
• To send you College notices by postal address and/or email address as required by College bylaw 17.1 (available on our Governance page). This includes notification about our Annual General Meeting.
• If you are a UK Junior member, we will use your exam results to enable us to automatically upgrade you to Ordinary membership once you become eligible in line with the College bylaws (available on our Governance page). We will of course write to you to let you know about the change in membership.
• As part of your membership subscription we will also use your information to provide you with a number of benefits. This includes sending you our member magazine, Milestones, providing you with information about our annual RCPCH Conference and sending you College and professional updates which may include information about joint initiatives or organisations we are partnering with where we are supervising or project managing the project. You can opt out of any of these benefits by changing your mailing preferences on your online account. Please be aware that if you decide to opt out of these, you will stop receiving some of the benefits we offer as part of your membership. 
• If you request, we will also use your details to post Archives of Disease in Childhood (where eligible) to you. This can be requested for an additional fee by contacting the Member Services team on membership@rcpch.ac.uk - see our ADC page.

If you do not provide us with your personal data for these purposes, we may be unable to offer you membership of the College or you may not receive all of the benefits of membership.

We will collect and use your personal information where this is necessary in our legitimate interest for the following purposes:

• If you apply to be a member of an RCPCH committee, Council or one of our working groups, we will use your personal data to process your application and for the purposes of administering the committee/working group and contacting you about committee/working group/Council business. For some roles, there is a requirement to have your chosen email address made publicly available on the RCPCH website. Where this is applicable, this will be detailed in the role description. If the applicant is unable to provide this, it may affect the eligibility of the applicant.
• If you undertake a volunteer role for the College, we will process your personal data where it is in our legitimate interest to do so, in connection with the role. If you are a non-member volunteering for the college, we will only collect and process your personal data where it is necessary in our legitimate interest to provide you with and support the administration of the role. 
• We will share the data of retiring clinicians and Senior Fellows and Members with the British Paediatric Surveillance Unit (BPSU) to enable them to remove retired clinicians from their contact database.

In the execution of a Public Task (identifying and managing rare diseases) we will share the data of newly qualified paediatricians with the BPSU to enable them to identify and contact relevant individuals and engage them with the rare diseases reporting programme. 

We will collect and use your special category data where there is a substantial public interest to ensure equality of treatment and opportunity for the following purposes:

• We collect equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) data to ensure compliance with the Equality Act 2010 and monitor and promote equal opportunities in paediatrics. We ask all members, examiners, candidates and those representing the College (such as officers and committee members) to provide EDI data; a "prefer not to say" option is available. More information is available in the equality, diversity and inclusion privacy notice. 

Communications

We will also use your data in the following ways to communicate with you. You can opt out of receiving any of these at any time by updating your preferences on your online account.

• We will update you about our workforce census and our audit work, audit, including clinical audits. 
• We will send you communications (usually by email) to keep you up to date with our training and education activities and to let you know about other membership types you are eligible for, how to apply and the benefits.
• If you have opted in to this option, we will also send you RCPCH surveys about child health and the College's work and activities so that we can use the feedback to research how we can improve the way we support our members and the profession. These surveys will have their own privacy notices which you should also read.
• We will send members our Member Survey so that we can feed this into our strategy and planning, to improve the support and services we offer. 
• We may use profiling techniques to provide us with more general information about you so that we are contacting you with the most appropriate communication. We will use information that you have provided to us and publicly available data which could include public databases (such as Companies House), news or other media. This activity assists us in understanding the background of our members and helps us to make appropriate requests to members who may have the means to be able to help attract, provide or support funding for RCPCH activity. 

Where we are relying on legitimate interests, we will always balance our legitimate interests against your rights as an individual and make sure we only use personal information in a way or for a purpose that you would reasonably expect in accordance with this notice and that does not intrude on your privacy or previously expressed marketing preferences.

Where you have provided us with your specific consent (opted in), we will send you direct marketing communications (usually by email) relating to the field of Paediatrics and Child Health and also information about how you can support the College further. This includes activities such as CPD (continuing professional development), volunteering opportunities and media articles. We may also communicate with you on behalf of other organisations where you have opted in to receive third party communications.

You can view and update your preferences at any time on your online account to opt into or out of communications. 

Criminal offence data

We will only ask for criminal offence data (data relating to criminal convictions and offences, or related security measures) where this may restrict registering for membership, such as if there are any ongoing or completed regulatory action or criminal proceedings. We do not ask applicants resident in the UK to disclose convictions deemed as spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.

Only relevant convictions will be taken into account and disclosure will not necessarily be a bar to membership application. We will only process your criminal data where we have consent or where it is necessary for the College functions in ensuring the public is protected by ensuring only fit and proper persons are members.

To find out more details about how we comply with UK Data Protection Legislation when processing criminal conviction data, please read our data protection and confidentiality policy (section 10).

Transferring information outside of the UK

To provide some products and services we, or our data processors, may transfer and process information in countries outside of the UK. Some of these countries, such as those in the EEA, will have an officially recognised equivalent level of protection to the UK (adequacy decision). A list of these countries can be found via the ICO website. Where there is no adequacy decision, we will take all reasonable steps necessary to ensure that your information is protected by having in place a recognised safeguard with our partners and suppliers, such as regulatory approved UK International Transfer Agreements, Binding Corporate Rules or Codes of Conduct. Otherwise we will ask for your explicit consent.
 
To find out more about any specific uses of information in countries outside of the UK, or for further information about the safeguards that we have put in place, please contact the RCPCH Data Protection Officer on information.governance@rcpch.ac.uk.

Where do we get your personal data from?

Most of the data we use to administer your membership will be directly provided by you as part of your membership application form, or within the course of your business with the College.

However, if you are nominated for an honorary fellowship of the RCPCH, your data will be sourced from your nominator. To find out more about how we use your personal data for this process, see the Honorary Fellowship privacy notice.

We may also receive information relating to you from other organisations and authorities such as the GMC in connection with your membership and professional life.

Information we share

We will share information internally between relevant departments where necessary to fulfil our activities or to support our work (contractual obligation). If your membership is paid for by your employer as part of an arrangement with the College, we will share information about the progress of your application status with them. 

If another Royal Medical College asks us to verify your RCPCH qualification or membership we will verify this along with date of conferment if requested as it is within our legitimate interests to do so to protect the reputation of the College.

If another third party, such as a potential employer, asks us to verify your RCPCH qualification or membership we will follow our Verification of membership and examinations process. 

We will also share information with third parties where there is a statutory requirement or legal obligation to do so. This may include but is not limited to the General Medical Council, postgraduate deaneries and overseas equivalents, Department of Health, NHS, examination centres or to prevent fraudulent activity.

We will share a list of Senior RCPCH fellows with the British Paediatric Surveillance Unit (BPSU) so that they can identify reporting clinicians who are Senior RCPCH Fellows, for the purposes of contacting them to ask for their support in improving response rates in their region (legitimate interest). Please see the BPSU privacy notice for more information. 

We will share information with appropriate third parties where it is in our legitimate interest to improve clinical practice, medical training and our services and where it does not intrude on your privacy. We will always anonymise this data where possible. We may also share your data with a trusted partner organisation (if applicable) where it is necessary for us to be able to deliver member benefits (such as providing the Archives of Disease and Childhood journal).

For trainees

If you are a trainee, your name and email address will be shared with your regional trainee representative so that they can keep you informed about various issues that are discussed by the RCPCH Trainee Committee, latest developments and paediatric events in your region. 

You can opt out of these emails by contacting your regional representative. If the post is vacant, email training.services@rcpch.ac.uk.

About the Trainee Committee

How long will we keep your information for?

We regularly review what information we hold about you and delete it in line with College Retention Schedules. When your membership expires we will retain your file for six years from the end of your membership in line with the Limitations Act 1980 and our College Retention Policy.

We currently store a core membership record on our database with details about you such as contact details and preferences, payment details, qualifications and work details. Some of this information, such as name, biographies and work history will be kept for the College Archives if it is of historical interest. We are currently developing a process to be able to review and securely and safely delete irrelevant information. Find out more about the College archive.

Currently, if your application is unsuccessful, we will retain a copy of the letter on your file so that it can be referred to if there are any further applications or concerns about the application in future. If you are then successful, your information will be incorporated into your membership file.
 

Your rights

You have the following rights in relation to your data:

• Right of access and right to have a copy of your personal data in a standard format (right to data portability). You can ask us for a copy of the information that we hold about you. You can also ask us for a copy of your data in a standard format where this is technically possible. But this only applies where we are holding your information with your consent or as part of a contract with you. 
• Change any factual errors or inaccuracies (right of rectification). If you have an RCPCH online account you can change and update your personal data. Alternatively, you can contact membership by email at membership@rcpch.ac.uk or by phone at 020 7092 6000 (ask for Member Services). It is your responsibility to update us of any changes to the personal information you have provided. You can also contact us either via our contact form or contact the relevant team directly.
• Delete your personal data (called a right to erasure). We cannot delete all personal data as we may have a legal obligation or because we have a requirement to retain it for a task in the public interest, but we can delete non-essential data. 
• Restrict the use of your data (right of restriction). You can request that we deactivate your RCPCH online account or that we only store your data but undertake no further processing. However, this only applies to certain circumstances.
• Object to processing (right to objection). You can ask that we stop using data that is not necessary for fulfilling our legal obligations. 
• Where you have consented to us using your personal data, you can withdraw consent at any time by contacting us either via our contact form or contact the relevant team directly, or if related to your mailing preferences, you can update these on your your online account.

Please contact the RCPCH Data Protection Officer if you wish to make a request (information.governance@rcpch.ac.uk, +44(0)20 7092 6000, 5-11 Theobalds Road, London, WC1X 8SH).

If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.

How to contact us or complain

If you are unhappy with how we are using your personal data, you should contact us in the first instance so that we can understand and try to resolve your concern. If we can't resolve the issue you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioners Office (ICO). The ICO is the UK's independent body set up to uphold information rights.

The ICO’s address:           

Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Helpline number: 0303 123 1113

ICO website: https://www.ico.org.uk

If you have any questions about our privacy policy, the information we hold about you or you wish to make a complaint, please send an email to: information.governance@rcpch.ac.uk

Changes to this privacy policy

We keep our privacy policy under review, and we will place any updates on this web page. This privacy policy was last updated on 10 July 2024.

Further information

If you want to find out more about how we process your information in relation to specific systems or processes that we manage, please read the appropriate privacy notice. Below are links to some of our main processes:

• RCPCH Learning
• RCPCH examinations (see Appendix A)
• RCPCH ePortfolio
• Awards

To find out more about how we process your personal data generally on our website, view the RCPCH website privacy notice.