Privacy Policy

Silver Fern Research is an international market research agency specialising in the healthcare sector. Our clients engage our services to conduct market research surveys on their behalf.

Silver Fern Research is bound by the codes of conduct of the Market Research Society (MRS), The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) and the British Healthcare Business Intelligence Association (BHBIA).

Silver Fern Research is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) under the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998. This Privacy Policy is updated to reflect the provisions in the new EU General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR. Act 2016/679EU).

Silver Fern Research is committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected. Any personal information that you share with us will only be used in accordance with this privacy statement. This privacy statement details how we collect information, what we do with it and what controls you have. Silver Fern Research may change this policy from time to time. You should check this page from time to time to ensure that you are happy with any changes. This policy is effective from May 25^th  2018.

We hope that this policy gives you a clear understanding of how your data is treated.

Why we contact respondents

At times, we are asked by our clients to contact potential survey participants using data from their records. This data may be shared with one of our fieldwork partners who undertake to make contact with you on our behalf with a view to securing your participation in one of our surveys.

If this data is shared with such a third party, we ensure that they handle your data with the same levels of security, control and care that we do.

If you have agreed to participate in one of our surveys, your contact details will be supplied to us by one of our fieldwork partners and we may contact you by telephone or email in order to confirm the details concerning your participation.

We may also contact you by telephone or email if, having participated in a survey, you have given consent for us to contact you further regarding the survey.

Information we collect

As part of our surveys, we will collect the following information:

Use of your personal data

Your contact information is only shared within the company and our associates to facilitate collection of the survey data. Silver Fern Research sometimes works with a few third parties in order to effectively conduct the market research projects that we undertake on behalf of our clients. If a third party processes your personal information we make sure they handle your data with the same levels of security, due care and attention that we do. We do not provide your personal information to our clients or direct marketers.

We will never sell your data under any circumstances and will not use it for any other purpose than facilitating the market research surveys that we are commissioned to conduct on behalf of our clients.

We collect survey data via in-depth telephone interviews, face-to-face interviews, focus groups and web-based surveys. All audio files, video files and web survey results are stored on our secure server and transferred as needed via encrypted, EU-based portals.

We do not store your personal information on any long-term respondent database .

Your personal information and survey results remain on our secure server only for the duration of the survey project. When the project is completed, our associates are required to remove and electronically shred all project related data from their laptops and/ or mobile devices. An anonymized version of the data will be retained in our archives. Copies of payment records are retained on our server for 7 years in line with HMRC legal requirements.  Anonymized copies of our survey data and survey reports are retained on our servers in perpetuity.

Upon completion of a survey, our survey reports containing your anonymized and amalgamated responses will be shared with our clients. Our reports have the potential to be shared internationally, but no personal data or other identifying information will be present in these reports. Our reports may contain anonymized survey data, amalgamated survey data and individual, anonymized quotes.

You can request to be removed from a given survey until the project is completed through your contact at Silver Fern Research, by emailing enquiries@silverfern.co.uk  or by calling 01932-872053.

Cookies

Cookies are small pieces of information sent by a web server to store on a web browser. They are used by almost all websites. Cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our site. The information collected contains no personal data but is used to give us information on the number of visitors to our site, the sites from which the visitors came and the pages of our website that they visited.

To find out more about cookies, please visit https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/online/cookies

Anonymity and Security

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. To prevent unauthorised access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect.

Within Silver Fern Research and our associates, we will share contact information and pseudonymized survey data via encrypted portals.

We will only share survey data with our clients once the material has been anonymized to remove any personal identifying information.

Your Rights

The new data protection law, started May 2018, gives everyone a number of very important rights. These are:

More information

If you would like to know more about your rights under the data protection law see the Information Commissioners Office  website. www.ico.org.uk

If you would like to contact us regarding a specific privacy rights issue, please email enquiries@silverfern.co.uk  or call 01932-872053.