Privacy

The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System is committed to protecting the privacy of individuals.

Every reasonable effort will be made to ensure that an individual’s personal information is collected, used, stored and disclosed only as appropriate and permitted by law. Please note, however, that the Royal Commission is not generally subject to the privacy laws which usually apply to government bodies.

Where the Royal Commission has concerns for the health or safety of any person in connection with information it receives, the Royal Commission may report those concerns and/or provide information to other parties, authorities, Government departments or agencies such as emergency and health services.

When an individual makes a ‘formal submission’ or ‘brief comments’ to the Royal Commission, individuals will have an opportunity to specify that the information provided is to be treated as confidential and restricted from publication or only published anonymously.

If you provide the Royal Commission with personal information about other individuals, the Royal Commission relies on you to ensure they understand that their information is being provided to the Royal Commission and may be handled as described here.

If you do engage with the Royal Commission (whether by providing brief comments, formal submissions, or otherwise), the Royal Commission may contact you, for example to seek further details about information provided.

You can choose to receive updates from the Royal Commission by email. If you choose this but then change your mind, you can unsubscribe at any time by following the process set out in the emails that the Royal Commission sends you. Please see below for further information about our email provider, Mailchimp.

Information access and record management

The Royal Commission works with the support of its advisers and service providers, including legal and healthcare advisors and document management, IT and delivery service providers. Those parties may have access to personal information in order to perform their roles for the Royal Commission.

On conclusion of the Royal Commission, the records of the Royal Commission (including confidential information and documents) will be transferred to the Department of Premier and Cabinet or another nominated Victorian public office. The records will then be transferred to the Public Records Office Victoria for archiving.

Our website and online services

Like many sites, this website may use cookies from time to time.

Cookies are small data files that a website is able to place on a user's device to record aspects of that user's experience of the website. For example, we may use cookies to record that a user visited a particular section of the web site, that their browsing software was a particular version or to ensure that you do not need to re-input information when moving between web pages.

The default settings of browsers like Chrome and Safari may allow some or all cookies, but users can easily take steps to erase cookies from their hard-drive, block all cookies, or receive a warning before a cookie is stored. However, some parts of sites may not function fully for users that disallow cookies.

This website uses Google Analytics to track and measure visitation numbers using clickstream data, cookies and web beacons. For more about how Google collects and processes data, please see Google’s privacy policy and their information at www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/.

The Royal Commission’s website service provider Harvest Digital Planning supports the Royal Commission’s operation of this website. Harvest uses cookies and collects and handles limited metadata and other information as described in its Privacy Policy available at the-hive.com.au/privacy-policy.

The Royal Commission may also use online survey tools. The Royal Commission owns all data submitted through these tools and controls access to that data. The providers of those tools (e.g. Qualtrics) may collect anonymised and aggregated metadata which does not identify individuals, e.g. number of responses to a survey.

The Royal Commission uses a service called Mailchimp to create and deliver certain emails, and provide related services including mailing list management and segmentation and reporting on how recipients interact with our emails. Mailchimp (and its contractors) use cookies, web beacons and flash player codes and collect and handle personal information as described in its Privacy Policy available at mailchimp.com/legal/privacy and Cookie Statement available at mailchimp.com/legal/cookies.

From time to time, this site may contain links to other sites. The Royal Commission is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of those sites.

For further information, please contact the Commission on 1800 00 11 34.