Privacy Statement
At Scrivens Opticians & Hearing Care, we’re committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.
This policy explains when and why we collect personal information about people who visit our website, contact us via telephone, or visit one of our branches; how we use this information, the conditions under which we may disclose it to others and how we keep it secure.
We may change this policy from time to time, so please check this page occasionally to ensure that you are aware of any changes. By using our website, contacting us by telephone, or visiting one of our branches, you’re agreeing to be bound by this policy.
Any questions regarding this policy and our privacy practices should be sent by email to [email protected] or by writing to The Customer Care Team, Scrivens Opticians & Hearing Care, Scrivens House, 60 Islington Row Middleway, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 1PH. Alternatively, you can call us free on 0800 626 427.
Who are we?
We’re Scrivens Opticians & Hearing Care, a family owned and run business founded in 1938. Our registered address is Scrivens House, 60 Islington Row Middleway, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 1PH. The Scrivens group of companies comprises of over 170 high street branches trading under the following names: Scrivens Opticians & Hearing Care, Scrivens Hearing Care, Bradleys Opticians, Greenslades Opticians and Howes Opticians.
Our responsibility to you as a healthcare provider
As a registered provider of both optical and hearing care services we have a duty to follow the General Optical Council (GOC) and British Society of Hearing Aid Audiologists (BSHAA) guidelines relating to contacting our patients for essential healthcare check ups and the length of time we must keep patient records.
We review our data retention periods for personal information on a regular basis. We are legally required to hold some types of information to fulfil our statutory obligations. We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant activity, or as long as is set out in GOC and BSHAA guidelines:
GOC Guidelines
| Type of record | Recommended period of retention |
| Adult patients | 10 years, even if the patient has subsequently died |
| Children and young people | 10 years after they were last seen or until the patient’s 25th birthday if later. If the child or young person has died, keep the records for 10 years after they were last seen |
BSHAA Guidelines
Records should be retained in accordance with legislation relating to health records. In the absence of other guidance, records should be retained for a minimum of seven years.
How do we collect information from you?
We obtain information about you when:
What type of information is collected from you?
The personal information we collect might include your name, age (date of birth), address, telephone number, email address, IP address, your current or preferred branch and information regarding what pages you accessed and when.
If you purchase a product from us online, your card information is not held by us, it is collected by our third party payment processors (Barclaycard EPDQ), who specialise in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions.
If you purchase a product from us in branch using a credit or debit card, a copy of your credit card number will be kept with all paperwork relating to your order; the CVV number on your card is not kept.
How is your information used?
We may use your information to:
These are examples of how we use your information and are not to be regarded as an exhaustive list. Your personal data is processed so that we can provide you with the best possible eye and hearing health care and customer experience.
Who has access to your information?
We will not sell or rent your information to third parties.
We will not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.
Third Party Service Providers working on our behalf:
We may pass your information to our third party service providers, subcontractors and other associated organisations for the purposes of completing tasks and providing services to you on our behalf, (for example to manufacture glasses and hearing aids and to send you emails). However, when we use third party service providers, we disclose only the personal information that is necessary to deliver the service and we have a contract in place that requires them to keep your information secure and not to use it for their own direct marketing purposes. Please be assured that we will not release your information to third parties for them to use for their own direct marketing purposes, unless we are required to do so by law, for example, by a court order or for the purposes of prevention of fraud or other crime.
Third Party Product Providers we work in association with:
When you are using our secure online e-commerce pages, your payment is processed by a third party payment processor (Barclaycard EPDQ), who specialises in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions. If you have any questions regarding secure transactions, please contact us.
If we need to conduct a credit check, your information may be passed on to TransUnion Information Group, located at One Park Lane, Leeds, West Yorkshire LS3 1EP, for purposes such as credit risk and affordability checking, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering checks, identity verification and tracing for debt collection purposes. Full information regarding TransUnion’s Privacy Notice can be found at https://www.transunion.co.uk/legal-information/bureau-privacy-notice.
Sale or Closure of our Business
We have a duty of care to ensure you have access to ongoing optical and hearing care. Should we close or sell some or all of our business and assets as part of any business restructuring or reorganisation, wherever possible we will arrange to transfer your records to another Optical or Hearing provider chosen by us. If this happens, we will write to you with full details, including details of how you can request your records to be transferred to an alternative provider of your choice. In the unlikely event we cannot find a suitable alternative provider, we will make arrangements to transfer your records to the local Primary Care Organisation (PCO) or a person nominated by the PCO.
Legal and Other Obligations
We may also transfer your data to third parties if we’re under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or to enforce or apply our terms of use or to protect the rights, property or safety of our customers. However, we will take steps to ensure that your privacy rights continue to be protected and will inform you in the event of any of the above happening, so that you are aware of any changes that may affect you.
The NHS, Information Governance and GDPR:
As an accredited provider of adult hearing services on behalf of the NHS, we comply fully with their Information Governance Policy. The legal framework governing the use of personal confidential data in health care is complex. It includes the NHS Act 2006, the Health and Social Care Act 2012, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Human Rights Act.
The law allows personal data to be shared between those offering care directly to patients, but it protects patients’ confidentiality when data about them is used for other purposes. These “secondary uses” of data are essential to run a safe, efficient, and equitable health service. They include:
Generally speaking, people within the healthcare system using data for secondary purposes must only use data that does not identify individual patients, unless they have the consent of the patient themselves.
Scrivens’ Data Protection Officer is Mark Georgevic, who can be contacted at the following address:
Your choices
You have a choice about whether or not you wish to receive information from us. If you do not want to receive direct marketing communications from us about any offers, products or services, you can manage your preferences by contacting your local branch, or by calling our Customer Care Team on 0800 626 427.
Please note that as a healthcare provider we are obliged to contact you when you are due or overdue for your next scheduled appointment for eye care or hearing care.
How you can access and update your information
The accuracy and availability of your personal information is important to us. If you change email address, or any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, or you would like a copy of the information we hold about you, please email us at: [email protected], or write to us at: The Customer Care Team, Scrivens Opticians & Hearing Care, Scrivens House, 60 Islington Row Middleway, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 1PH. Alternatively, you can telephone our Customer Care Team free on 0800 626 427.
Security precautions in place to protect the loss, misuse or alteration of your information
Scrivens is fully committed to adhering to all principles of GDPR and as such, we have conducted a formal DPIA (Data Protection Impact Assessment) of all our main systems. No unmitigated risks have been identified as a result of this.
When you give us personal information, we take steps to ensure that it’s treated securely. Any sensitive information, (such as credit or debit card details), is encrypted and protected with 128 Bit encryption on SSL. When you are on a secure page, a lock icon will appear on the bottom of web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Google Chrome.
Non-sensitive details (your email address etc.) are transmitted normally over the Internet and this can never be guaranteed to be 100% secure. As a result, while we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your information, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems. Where we have given, (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our website, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share your password with anyone.
Profiling
We may analyse your transactional information to create a profile of your interests and preferences so that we can contact you with information relevant to you. We may also use your personal information to detect and reduce fraud and credit risk. We do not, however, use any automated decision making based on such profiling. If you wish to be excluded from all profiling, please email, write to, or telephone our Customer Care Team using the contact details given above.
When you use this website
Use of ‘cookies’
Our website uses cookies to better the users’ experience while visiting the website.
Cookies are small files saved to the users’ computers’ hard drive that track, save and store information about the users’ interactions and usage of the website. This allows the website, through its server, to provide the user with a tailored experience within our website.
Users are advised that if they wish to deny the use and saving of cookies from our website on to their computer hard drive, they should the take necessary steps within their web browser security settings to block all cookies from our website and its external serving vendors.
Our website uses tracking software to monitor its visitors to better understand how they use it. This software is provided by Google Analytics which uses cookies to track visitor usage. The software will save a cookie to your computer hard drive in order to track and monitor your engagement and usage of the website, but will not store, save or collect personal information. You can read Google’s privacy policy here for further information.
Other cookies may be stored to your computer’s hard drive by external vendors when our website uses referral programs, sponsored links or adverts. Such cookies are used for conversion and referral tracking and typically expire after 30 days, though some may take longer. No personal information is stored, saved or collected.
The Scrivens website utilises Facebook’s Meta Pixel and it can collect the following data:
email, address, quantity, etc., for when you purchase a product or service. We don’t capture field values unless you include them as part of Advanced Matching or optional values.Links to other websites
Our website may contain links to other websites run by other organisations, (e.g. Alzheimer’s Society and the British Tinnitus Association). This Privacy Policy applies only to our website‚ so we encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit. We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other sites, even if you access them using links from our website.
In addition, if you linked to our website from a third party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners and operators of that third party site and recommend that you check the policy of that third party site.
If you are 16 or under
We are concerned to protect the privacy of children aged 16 or under. If you are aged 16 or under‚ please get your parent/guardian’s permission beforehand whenever you provide us with personal information.
Website recording
At certain periods, our website may also use specific website recording software. This software may record mouse clicks, mouse movements, page scrolling and any text keyed into certain website forms. The information collected will not include bank details or any sensitive personal data. Any data collected by this software is for Scrivens’ internal use only. The information collected is used to improve our website usability and is stored and used for aggregated and statistical reporting.
Review of this Policy
We keep this policy under regular review. This policy was last updated in July 2024.