This is the privacy statement for the Grief Support and Education Charitable Trust (trading as "Grief Centre") ("we", "us", "our").
At the Grief Centre, we take your privacy seriously and we are committed to protecting your personal information. The Privacy Act 2020 (Act) requires us to tell you certain things about the personal information we need to carry out our functions.
At the Grief Centre we are committed to upholding the relevant professional codes of ethics (such as, NZAC, NZCCA, NZPB, SWRB, and others). Protecting clients' privacy is an important part of ethical practice and we take this seriously; protection of your personal information is paramount. Standard practice at Grief Centre is to only disclose information about our clients when it is necessary and always with your prior knowledge and preferably with your consent.
This Privacy Policy describes how we collect and hold your personal information, how we deal with it, who we disclose it to, and how you can access the personal information we hold about you, in accordance with the Act and where applicable, the Health Information Privacy Code 2020 (Code). You can choose to withhold personal information, but this may restrict the range and quality of services we can provide to you.
If you have any questions about our collection, storage, use or disclosure of your personal information please contact us.
Collection of Personal Information
We may collect information about you:
when you contact us (e.g. telephone call, email or in person) to enquire about our services; or
from third parties where you have authorised this (or where your representative has authorised this on your behalf, if you are unable to); or
from publicly available information; or
otherwise as permitted by law.
Personal Information we collect and hold
Depending on your interactions with us, the types of personal information that we may collect, and hold, include:
your name, date of birth, and contact information such as your postal address, email address, phone number, and emergency contact details;
information about your medical history which is relevant to us providing our services to you;
information regarding the relationships with your family, friends and/or information with respect to your relationship with someone who is now deceased which helps us to provide better services to you;
any additional information you provide, such as when you contact us, or when you register with us;
consultation notes/records of our meetings with you;
a record of any queries you have made or communications you have with us;
payment information; and
any other information that you authorise us to collect. We may collect other information when you use our website or social media pages which is not necessarily personal information, e.g. your IP address, cookies, and information about your device, browser and operating system.
Storage of Personal Information
We will take reasonable steps to protect and keep secure the personal information we hold.
We hold personal information in various formats, such as on servers, cloud-based storage (such as Microsoft Onedrive, Microsoft Office 365 applications and the Monday.com CRM), and databases.
We also have internal procedures, including restricted view access, password protection and two-factor authentication, which restricts which staff members can see your personal information.
Personal information collected and stored by us will be held for only as long as necessary to achieve the purposes for which we collected the information, and otherwise as required by law. Subject to certain exceptions, we are required to hold health information for 10 years under the Health (Retention of Health Information) Regulations Act 1996 from the last time we provided services to you. After such time, we will arrange for the secure destruction of your personal information, either via shredding, permanent deletion or an external secure destruction service.
Use of Personal Information
We may use personal information for the following purposes:
to assess and process any request for services you have made with us;
to provide our services and to communicate with you, or those you (or your representative if you are unable) have authorised us to communicate with, regarding such services;
to respond and follow up on any queries, complaints or requests you might have made;
to collect or recover any payments owing from you;
to advise you of our services via email or post, if you choose to be on our mailing list;
to invite feedback about our services to monitor quality and improve services;
with your prior consent, we may conduct research and develop resources, guidance and training around grief and bereavement support (noting that we will anonymise information before it is shared with any third party for these purposes);
to comply with our obligations under any laws in New Zealand.
Disclosure
We do not disclose personal information to third parties for them to use for their own purposes. We may, however, disclose your personal information:
if such disclosure is in our opinion necessary to prevent or lessen a serious threat to the life or health of your or another; and
if you (or your representative if you are unable) have consented and have authorised us to do so.
to service providers involved in the provision of our services to you including counsellors, your general practitioner or other health care providers;
to your parent/guardian, partner, authorised representative or other family member, where you have authorised this or where it is necessary to ensure the safety and wellbeing of you or others;
to the Police or other emergency services providers if we consider that this is necessary to keep you or others safe;
to any person when disclosure is required or authorised by law; and
to any other person or entity to whom you (or your representative if you are unable) have consented for us to disclose your personal information.
Third-party providers we use also adhere to a privacy policy and are governed by the same Government Legislation referenced here.
Access to or Correcting Your Personal Information
Subject to certain grounds for refusal set out in the Act, you have the right to request access to any of your readily retrievable personal information we hold about you. When we hold information that you are entitled to access, we will endeavour to provide you with relevant choices as to how access is provided (e.g. email or post).
You can request access to, or correct your personal information, by contacting us at the address below.
When you contact us, you should provide evidence of who you are and set out the details of your request (e.g. the personal information, or the correction, that you are requesting).
If the information held by us is incorrect, inaccurate, incomplete, or not up to date, then you may ask us to correct the information and we will either correct the information or make a record of your comment, as we think appropriate.
Marketing, Research and Opting Out
We may contact you from time to time with marketing material about our other products or services, or with research-based surveys. You may opt out of receiving this material at any time by contacting us at the address below.
Your consent to receive this information will remain current until you advise us otherwise.
Applicable law
This Privacy Policy is governed by New Zealand law. Your personal information will be collected, used, stored, protected and disclosed in accordance with this Privacy Policy and New Zealand law. The courts of New Zealand have non-exclusive jurisdiction.
This Privacy Policy does not limit or exclude any of your rights under the Act or the Code. If you wish to seek further information on the Act and Code, see www.privacy.org.nz and www.privacy.org.nz/privacy-act-2020/codes-of-practice/hipc2020/
Privacy Concerns, Questions or Complaints
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy and/or our handling of personal information or you believe that we have at any time failed to keep one of our commitments to you to handle your personal information in the manner required by the Privacy Act or the Code, please lodge a written complaint addressed to our Privacy Officer using the contact details below:
Devon Healey, Privacy Officer
Grief Centre
PO Box 34548
Birkenhead
Auckland 0746
Email: gm@griefcentre.org.nz
Telephone: 0800 331 333
Once we receive your complaint, we will respond to acknowledge your complaint within five working days.
We will aim to advise you of the outcome of your complaint within ten working days of receiving the complaint. If we need more time to undertake an investigation into the complaint, we will let you know.
If the complaint is upheld, we will advise you about what (if any) action we consider is appropriate for us to take in response.
If after the above time frames you are still not satisfied with how the complaint was handled, then you may choose to contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at:
Phone: 0800 803 909 (from 8.30am to 5pm, Monday to Friday) / (04) 474 7595
Post: PO Box 10-094 The Terrace, Wellington, 6143
Email: enquiries@privacy.org.nz
This policy was last modified on 16 June 2026.
