Privacy Policy

We are Hospice UK, the charity for hospice care in the UK, working closely with our members to support their work and to advocate for and raise awareness of hospice care. Hospice UK is a registered charity (no. 1014851 in England and Wales, and no. SC041112 in Scotland) and company limited by guarantee (no. 2751549).

The registered address is Hospice House, 34-44 Britannia Street, London, WC1X 9JG. The Hospice UK Group comprises Hospice UK and its wholly owned trading subsidiary Help the Hospices Trading Limited.

For the purpose of the UK's Data Protection Acts and UK General Data Protection Regulation (which together we will call “Data Protection Rules”), the data controller is Hospice UK. The information you provide will be held in accordance with Data Protection Rules and may be used by Hospice UK and its agents to supply any services which you have requested or products you have ordered.

How do we collect information from you?

We obtain information about you when you use our website, for example when you register for one of our networks/communities or to receive one of our newsletters, when you contact us to make a donation, or enquire about our services and products.

What information is collected from you?

Hospice UK will only collect personal data that is relevant to the carrying out of its legitimate purposes and function.

Examples of the information we collect might include your contact details and information regarding your activity relating to our services, such as web statistics.

If you make a donation online or purchase something from us, your card information is not held by us; it is collected by our third party payments processors, who specialise in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions. If you are accessing any of our services as a hospice or palliative care professional we may also collect information such as your job title and the organisation you work for.

We may use your information to:

• process a donation that you have made;
• process orders that you have submitted;
• to carry out our obligations arising from any contracts made between you and us;
• seek your views or comments on the services we provide;
• notify you of changes to our services;
• ensure staff and volunteers have the information they need to carry out our work;
• send you communications which you have requested and which may be of interest to you; these may include information about campaigns, appeals, other fundraising, and professional topics; you can ‘opt out’ and ask us not send these communications at any time;
• process a grant or job application;
• ensure staff and volunteers have the information they need to carry out our work.

We review our retention periods for personal information on a regular basis. We are legally required to hold some types of information to fulfil our statutory obligations (for example the collection of Gift Aid). 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 any relevant contract between you and us.

At Hospice UK our work is only made possible thanks to the generosity of our supporters, so it’s vital that our fundraising efforts are as effective as they can be. By developing a better understanding of our supporters through researching them using freely available public sources we can tailor and target our fundraising communications to those most likely to be interested. This allows us to be more efficient and cost-effective and reduces the risk of someone receiving information from us that they might find irrelevant or intrusive. 

After always taking a supporter’s communication preferences into account, we may use information we have on our database to research their potential to be a significant donor to the charity. We may estimate their gift capacity based on information from freely available public sources such as charity websites and annual reviews, corporate websites, public social media accounts, the electoral register and Companies House. We may use trusted third-party specialist companies that collate and analyse information from public sources alongside statistical social-economic data to help us with this work. We do this in order to create a fuller understanding of someone’s interests and support and will only use reputable sources where someone could reasonably expect their information to be read by the public. 

We’re committed to putting you in control of your data and you’re free to opt-out from this activity at any time. To find out more please email dataprotection@hospiceuk.org or call us on 020 7520 8200 and ask for the Director of IT and Digital Services. 

We will not sell or rent your information to third parties.

We will not share your information with third parties for their marketing purposes.

We may pass your information on to third party service providers working on our behalf, where this is necessary for them to complete tasks and provide or fulfil services to you on our behalf. We will only pass on such information as is necessary for them to complete that work. Where data is passed to a third party for processing, Hospice UK will ensure that a written contract is in place that states that the agent will:

• process the data transferred only on the express instructions of Hospice UK;
• ensure data is used in full compliance with the Data Protection Rules; and
• implement appropriate security measures to protect the information transferred.

Any request for data based on a legal requirement e.g. from police or other bodies, must, where possible, be put in writing and will be considered by Hospice UK's Director of IT and Digital Services (who may seek independent legal advice) before data is disclosed.

You have a choice about whether or not you wish to receive information from us. If you do not want to receive communications from us about the vital work we do and our exciting services and products , then you can select this choice by ticking the relevant box(es) on the form on which we collect your information.

We will not contact you for fundraising marketing purposes by email unless you have given your prior consent for us to do so. We will not contact you for fundraising marketing purposes by post if you have indicated that you do not wish to be contacted.

You can change your communication preferences at any time by emailing info@hospiceuk.org, or by contacting us on 020 7520 8200.

If you are an employee or trustee of a hospice or other organisation which is a member or subscriber of Hospice UK then we may contact you, using your work email, address or telephone number, to provide you with information which we believe is relevant to your role in relation to your organisational membership.

If you do not wish to receive such information you can opt out of receiving it at any time by emailing info@hospiceuk.org or by contacting us on 020 7520 8200.

All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers. Any payment transactions will be encrypted. Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share a password with anyone.

Hospice UK employees and representatives will be responsible for ensuring that all proper and appropriate data care procedures are fully and conscientiously followed.

Non-sensitive details (your email address etc.) are transmitted over the internet, and this can never be guaranteed to be 100% secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use appropriate procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.

Data no longer required for the legitimate purposes of Hospice UK will be regularly removed. A clear rationale will be supplied for personal data to be kept beyond seven years.

All Hospice UK staff and representatives (including volunteers) have a duty to protect individuals' data from accidental disclosure and are required to comply with the following obligations:

• not to give their passwords to other people, who will then have access to the data they are entitled to view;
• not to reuse or recycle reports that contain personal data;
• to take care to ensure that data is not left accessible on laptops or in files either in or out of the office, where these can be accessed by unauthorised personnel.

We will strive to ensure that data collected is as accurate as possible. If you would like to ask for a copy of the data we hold on you please email dataprotection@hospiceuk.org or ring 020 7520 8200. 

A cookie is a text-only string of information that a website transfers to the cookie file of the browser on your computer's hard disk so that the website can remember who you are.

Hospice UK websites use cookies to validate your access to restricted parts of the sites and for collecting web statistics. You are able to accept or decline cookies by modifying the settings in your browser. However, you will not be able to login to the restricted area of the website if cookies are disabled. Cookies can also be manually removed from your web browser. There is more information on our cookies page.

We provide a tool called PopNAT (Population-based needs assessment tool) that has been created to support hospices, local decision makers and other service providers across health and social care to plan for the future, identify unmet need and to innovate services based on intelligence about the end of life and palliative care needs of the local population.


When you use PopNAT we do not know who you are. We do know your IP address. It is sometimes possible to identify a person from their IP address, but we do not and will not attempt to do this.

We log users’ actions so that we can improve the service and fix errors. Errors can sometimes occur because of a particular sequence of actions; by keeping the data we improve our chances of spotting such sequences. We keep such data for up to twelve weeks after which time it is unlikely to assist in error fixing, and it is either deleted or the IP address anonymised. After this time we no longer have your IP address.

Hospice UK often provides links to, and utilises websites run by other organisations. 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 websites even if you access them using links from Hospice UK.

We are concerned to protect the privacy of children aged 18 or under. If you are aged 18 or under‚ please make sure you have your parent/guardian's permission beforehand whenever you provide us with personal information.

The data that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the European Economic Area ("EEA"). It may also be processed by staff operating outside the EEA who work for us or for one of our suppliers.

Such staff may be engaged in, among other things, the fulfilment of your order, the processing of your payment details and the provision of support services. By submitting your personal data, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing. We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy policy.

We may make changes to this privacy policy from time to time. If we do make any such changes, we will post the changes on this page. Please revisit this policy each time you consider giving Hospice UK personal information. This policy was last updated in March 2024.

Written requests about Hospice UK's data protection and privacy policy should be sent to: Hospice UK, Hospice House, 34-44 Britannia Street, London WC1X 9JG or by email to dataprotection@hospiceuk.org.

We may make changes to this privacy policy from time to time. If we do make any such changes, we will post the changes on this page. Please revisit this policy each time you consider giving Hospice UK personal information.

Last update: March 2024