The Advice Service is confidential. This means we won’t disclose your contact with the Service unless we have your permission or there are exceptional reasons. There are some limited situations where we may share your information without your consent. For example:

• If you tell us about a significant risk of harm to yourself or others, we may have to report our concerns to the University or emergency services.
• We may be required to share information with third parties for the purposes of safeguarding children or adults at risk.
• There may also be occasions where we are required by law to disclose information e.g., in relation to criminal matters where a court order is issued.

If your enquiry relates to another department in JMSU, we may contact or forward your e-mail to the team who can best answer your questions. Please tell us if you don’t want to us do to this.

• Emails will be stored in the advice inbox until an advisor is allocated to your case. This may take between 2-5 working days. When your case is allocated, the information you have provided will be transferred to our encrypted case recording system. The information will be deleted from Microsoft 365.
• Case Records When you contact us, we will set up a confidential case record for you. The case recording software we use is AdvicePro and this system is encrypted. Your case record is only accessible to staff involved in running the Service. Records are stored for 7 years after the date we close your case. After this time, the records are automatically destroyed.

If you have been involved in a case involving other students and if both parties approach the Advice Service, they will work with a different adviser. This adviser may be from another Students’ Union. The advisers involved will not discuss the case with each other.

Occasionally, we may feel it is necessary to change the adviser you are seeing or to withdraw access to the Advice Service. The decision will only be made after careful consideration, and we will explain the reason to you. This could include the following;

If you threaten or use violence, or otherwise aggressive to staff. We cannot work with you if you are under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

• If we identify a conflict of interest
• If you knowingly provide misleading or incorrect information
• If you consistently miss your appointments

If we feel you are making inappropriate or excessive use of the Advice Service resources. We have limited resources and aim to allow as many students as possible to have appointments with advisers.

We will keep electronic records of your case that will contain your personal information for a period of seven years. These records are only accessible to JMSU Advice Service staff and relevant managers in JMSU. Anonymised information on the themes of work will be sent to LJMU and trusted organisations.