Privacy statement

Data controller

Any personal information that you provide on this website is controlled by AP.

Your personal information

Sometimes you will be asked to submit personal information about yourself (e.g. name, address and email address) in order to receive or use services on our websites or from our organisation. Such services include events, newsletters, publications, information and advice.

By entering your details in the fields requested and pressing 'Submit', or by sending this information via application forms in the post, by fax, by email or via other web based platforms you are consenting to the processing of your information by AP and its agents in accordance with this Data Policy. You may also provide personal information to us when you contact us by email, telephone or letter. Whenever you provide such personal information, we will treat that information in accordance with this policy. Our services are designed to give you the information that you have requested. AP will, at all times, act in accordance with current legislation and aim to meet current Internet best practice.

Use and storage of your personal information

When you supply any personal information to AP we have legal obligations towards you in the way we deal with that information. We must collect the information fairly, that is, we must explain how we will use it. This Data Policy explains how we will use your personal information.

We will use personal information provided by you or gathered by AP for the following purposes:

  • to help us identify you and the membership you hold with us, both for our own purposes and for approved providers and with regards to Practitioner Membership/ Advanced Practitioner Membership, members of the public who ask to verify membership;
  • in the case of Practitioner Membership/ Advanced Practitioner Membership, to make decisions regarding the appropriateness of accepting applicants as members;
  • if you are a member, to administer your membership record, inform you of campaigns, promotions and offers, provide services and fulfil our obligations to you as an AP member (including billing);
  • to communicate with you generally;
  • to provide you with information about services or opportunities offered by AP, or its carefully selected partners
  • research, survey completion and profiling;
  • statistical analysis and behavioural analysis;
  • to improve the services provided by AP;
  • to detect, investigate and prevent activity we think may be potentially illegal, unlawful or harmful, including:
    - fraud prevention and detection (including credit scoring and credit checking where we have sought your consent);
    - to enforce our Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions;
    - to comply with our legal obligations.

We embed videos from our official YouTube channel using YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode. This mode may set cookies on your computer once you click on the YouTube video player, but YouTube will not store personally-identifiable cookie information for playbacks of embedded videos using the privacy-enhanced mode.
Read more at YouTube’s embedding videos information page.

PREF - * Expires after eight months
VSC - * expires at the end of your session
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE - *expires after eight months
remote_sid - * expires at the end of your session

If you are a member, we also collect and process your data in accordance with the notices provided to you when you join and in the course of your membership; however, this Policy also applies to your data.

We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out above and we will remove it when the purposes have been met, unless you opt-in for future communications with us.

Where you are receiving newsletters or promotional emails we will, on each communication, offer you an easily executable 'opt-out' option, which will allow you to remove yourself from any future mailings. You can also email us if you do not wish to receive newsletters at 

You also consent to us confirming the existence of your membership to approved providers who you wish to obtain services from where either the services are only available to AP members or a benefit (such as a discount) is provided by those providers to AP members.

Sharing of your personal information

AP may share your personal information with third parties in the following ways:

  • We sometimes use agents and service providers to process personal information on our behalf. For example, we use third parties to send postal mail, email campaigns and to maintain our IT systems. Where we use agents and service providers to process your personal information, we will ensure that they have adequate security measures in place and are governed by our privacy policies in respect to the use of your personal information.
  • A member of the public or an organisation may request information confirming that you are a Practitioner member of AP and we will provide this information.
  • We will release your personal information when we are required to do so by law.
  • We will release your personal information to others when you have given your consent to that release.
  • to protect the rights, property or safety of AP or any third parties (for example for the purposes of fraud protection)
  • AP may occasionally present a promotion that is sponsored by a third-party company. To qualify for entry, we may ask you to provide personal information. If we plan to share that information with the sponsor(s) we will make this clear at the point of collection of your information.

We may also disclose your personal information to third parties if we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our website terms of use and/ or to protect our rights, property, safety, members, or others.

In some circumstances we may transfer your personal information to countries outside of the European Economic Area, where data protection safeguards are not as high as they are in the UK. If this occurs we will ensure that adequate procedures are put into place to protect your personal information.

As a professional body, it is in our legitimate interests to verify the membership status of an individual when we receive a query from a third party. One significant role of Practitioner Membership / Advanced Practitioner Membership is to promote the membership and qualifications of our members to the public. To this end we publish a member directory on our website and we answer telephone queries where we will give callers the following information about members: whether someone is currently a member; the date they became a member; the expiry or expected renewal date of their membership; current membership category; whether the member has a Practitioner Membership/Advanced Practitioner Membership qualification or not and the date/ expiry of qualifications; the criteria the member has demonstrated in order to achieve their level of membership; member status and grade on a specific date in the past.

Members of the public who make enquiries or complaints

We do not usually record or process any data from members of the public who ring us with general enquiries. We do not record phone calls.

If a member of the general public contacts us to make a complaint about a member we will need to record personal data (and often sensitive personal data) in order to investigate the complaint. We may also need to share this information with various third parties.

Sensitive personal data

Data Protection law recognises that certain categories of personal information are more sensitive such as health information, race, religious beliefs and political opinions.

We will collect information as part of Practitioner Membership/ Advanced Practitioner Membership applications and renewals where applicants/ members disclose details of previous or ongoing criminal or disciplinary actions. In situations where such disclosures are made, we will exercise our right to approach the relevant authorities to seek clarification of such disclosures.

Access to your personal information

You have the right to request a copy of the personal information AP holds about you and to have any inaccuracies corrected. We will ask for confirmation of identity before we disclose any personal information. Please address requests to  or to our postal address.

If you would like to correct any inaccuracies in your data, this can be done free of charge. To do this, you should:

  • put your request in writing;
  • provide us with enough information to identify you (e.g. membership number, username, registration details); and
  • specify the information that is incorrect and what it should be replaced with.

References that have been supplied as confidential will not be available on a subject request basis.

Cookies

To make this site simpler to use, we sometimes place small files on your computer. These are known as cookies, almost all websites do this too. Cookies have many uses and most are not damaging to your privacy, all of the cookies used on this web site fall into that category. We do not use cookies that collect or transfer your personal data to other web sites for advertising or any other purpose.

Cookies are used on this site purely to improve services for you through, for example:

  • enabling a service to recognise your device so you don't have to give the same information several times during one task;
  • recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don't need to do it for every web page requested;
  • measuring how many people are using the site, so it can be made easier to use and there's enough capacity to ensure it is fast enough.

We use Google Analytics to determine how many people use this site. Google Analytics stores information about the pages you visit, how long you are on the site, how you got here and how you utilise the website. We do not collect or store any directly Personally Identifiable Information (e.g. your name or address) which could be used to identify who you are. To find out more about how Google uses the information it stores in cookies please review their documentation.

The following cookies are used by Google Analytics:

  • _ga is used to distinguish users (anonymously) and expires after 2 years
  • _gid is used to distinguish users (anonymously) and expires after 24 hours
  • _gat is used to manage usage of the analytics functions and expires after 1 minute
  • _gac contains anonymous usage information and expires after 90 days


The following cookie may be used to provide other normal website functions:

  • asp.net_sessionid contains session related information for the user and  expires when the browser is closed


If you do not wish to accept any cookies on to your machine you can disable them by adjusting the settings on your browser. However, this is likely to adversely affect the functionality of the websites you visit. For further information visit: www.allaboutcookies.org

Your data may also be available to our website provider to enable us and them to deliver their service to us, carry out analysis and research on demographics, interests and behaviour of our users and supporters to help us gain a better understanding of them to enable us to improve our services. This may include connecting data we receive from you on the website to data available from other sources. Your personally identifiable data will only be used where it is necessary for the analysis required, and where your interests for privacy are not deemed to outweigh their legitimate interests in developing new services for us. In the case of this activity the following will apply:

  1. Your data will be made available to our website provider
  2. The data that may be available to them include any of the data we collect as described in this privacy policy.
  3. Our website provider will not transfer your data to any other third party, or transfer your data outside of the EEA.
  4. They will store your data for a maximum of 7 years.
  5. This processing does not affect your rights as detailed in this privacy policy.