Privacy policy - website

Who we are

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) is a registered charity in England and Wales (1057744) and in Scotland (SC038299). The College is a membership organisation that provides postgraduate medical education, sets professional standards and undertakes research and policy work in the area of paediatric and child health.

This privacy notice covers the data processed on the RCPCH website (rcpch.ac.uk), which includes your RCPCH online account and the following microsites: State of Child Health, Child Protection Portal, Patient Safety Portal.

It does not cover RCPCH &Us work. To find out more about how RCPCH &Us manages your personal data, please read the RCPCH &Us privacy notice. 

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
E-mail: 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 representative 

The College does not have an office outside the UK. To ensure the data rights of residents of the EEA and Switzerland, we have a dedicated page for EEA and Swiss residents, where you can find the in-country contact details for DataRep, who we have appointed as our Data Protection Representative in the European Union for the purposes of EU GDPR so that you can contact them directly in your home country.

What information do we collect about you?

Most of the personal data that we receive and store via our website is provided to us directly by you. However, we sometimes also receive personal data indirectly from other sources. Below is a list of the information we process:

• Information about your use of our site including details of your visits to pages viewed and resources accessed through the use of cookies. Such information includes traffic data, location data and other communication data. 
• Information provided voluntarily by you, such as when you register for an online RCPCH account, update your personal or work details, or complete a webform, such as nominations with your uploaded CV, order form, room booking enquiry form and feedback.
• Information that you provide when you communicate with us by any means.
• Within our bye-laws, we have a requirement to maintain certain committees. Minutes and papers relating to some of these Committees are also stored in a restricted access area of the website and may contain some personal data about staff, members and officers as our legal record of these meetings.
• We may use profiling techniques and publicly available data, which includes public databases (such as Companies House), news and other media to identify and contact members of the public who may have the means to help, attract, provide or support RCPCH's work, including fundraising, promotional and campaigning activities. We will only do this where we have carefully considered our legitimate interest and balanced it against the individual's privacy, using work and professional contact details where possible and never using solely automated means. 
• We may use existing information that we hold about you to answer enquiries.

Why do we collect this information?

Data protection law requires that we have one or more of the following lawful bases to process your information: 

• "Consent" - we may ask for your consent to process your personal data. You can withdraw consent at any time. 
• "Legitimate Interest" - where we have assessed that the benefits of us processing your data are legitimate and not outweighed by your interests or legal rights.
• "Contractual Obligation" - where we need to process your personal data either to take steps to enter into a contract with you or to fulfil a contract we already have with you.
• "Legal Obligation" - where we are required to process your personal data by law or to fulfil a statutory obligation.
• "Public Task" - where the processing is necessary for us to perform a task in the public interest, and it has a clear basis in law

We collect and process your personal data for the following purposes:

• To make improvements to the website and to our services (legitimate interest).
• To administer your online account including verifying your identity, such as by collecting your date of birth (legitimate interest).
• To process your enquiry and ask for feedback on our service (legitimate interest).
• To maintain and administer college committees in line with our bye-laws (legal obligation). 
• To maintain a register of interests of college committee members and trustees, to monitor and prevent any potential conflict of interests arising (legitimate interest).
• To administer an activity or service for which you have provided the information, such as to process your application (contractual obligation).
• To promote equal opportunities across our activities by asking you to submit diversity monitoring data (public task). More information is available in the equality, diversity and inclusion privacy notice.  
• When signing up to an online account, we ask you to select your contact preferences for marketing. Where you have consented, we will use your details to send you communications that are relevant to you (consent). You can change all contact preferences at any time through your online account. This does not cover RCPCH &Us communications - to manage your RCPCH &Us preferences, you can email and_us@rcpch.ac.uk.
• If you provide feedback on our website we will only use it to develop and improve the site. We do not store feedback but anonymous analysis of feedback may be kept indefinitely (legitimate interest).
• If we are concerned about a safeguarding issue, or receive abusive and inappropriate content, we may process, report or share this further where appropriate to deal with the concern (legal obligation, legitimate interest or public interest).

If you are a member, please see the Membership privacy notice for further details on how we manage your data and how long we keep your data for.

Information we share

In accordance with data protection law, we have a legal duty to protect any information we collect from you. We may sometimes need to share your information with RCPCH third party suppliers who are acting on our behalf as data processors to provide certain products and services for the College. However, we will only use your information for the purpose as described and we do not pass on your details to any other government department or other third parties unless you have given us permission to do so or we have a legal requirement to do so - for example, because you have opted in to receive third party communications via your mailing preferences on your RCPCH online account.

You can change your mailing preferences at any time by logging in to your online account.

How long do we hold your information for?

We put security measures in place to ensure that your information is securely stored. We will only keep your information for as long as it is necessary to fulfil our legal or statutory obligations, our business need or because it is of historical importance, in line with the College Retention Policy. This means we may retain some of your personal information for a set period of time after our relationship with you has ended.

Transferring information outside of the UK

To provide some products and services we 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 Standard Contractual Clauses, Binding Corporate Rules or Codes of Conduct.

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: information.governance@rcpch.ac.uk

Understanding GDPR and your data rights

To help you understand more about the information in this and all our privacy notices, see our page, Understanding GDPR and your data rights. This explains common words and phrases used in our privacy notices, describes our use of artificial intelligence (AI) and details the rights you have in relation to the processing of your personal data under UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR).

You are able to update your details at any time by logging in to your RCPCH account via the RCPCH website. It is the responsibility of the user to ensure that records are kept up-to-date as it relates to email addresses and other personal details.

RCPCH handles personal and special category information in accordance with the College’s data protection policy.

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

Use of cookies and analytics

We do use cookies and analytics on this website - find out how they work and how they use your personal data.

Other websites

Our website contains links to other websites such as RCPCH ePortfolio, including CPD Diary, RCPCH Learning, iParl (for campaigns), Libsyn (for podcasts), social media and the events booking system. Some of these sites may transfer data outside of the EEA with appropriate safeguards.

This privacy policy only applies to this website (rcpch.ac.uk) and the forms held on this website so when you link to other websites you should read their own privacy policies to find out how they use your data as well as cookies, tracking and analytics information.

Privacy notices for other websites linked on the RCPCH website, are linked in our Privacy Hub. 

Security

This site has security measures in place to protect the loss and alteration of information under our control. We will always manage your data in safely and securely in accordance with UK Data Protection legislation. Your data on the website will only ever be stored within the EU but it may be viewed internationally. If we upload your personal data to the website, we will only do so with your consent or where it is necessary as part of a contract or with a view to entering into a contract with you. 

Changes to our privacy policy

We keep our privacy policy under regular review and we will place any updates on this web page. See below for date last updated.

Please check these terms on a regular basis to make sure you are aware of any changes made by the RCPCH.

Last updated 4 December 2025