Terms and Conditions

SHaRON Terms and Conditions

Accessing SHaRON means you have read, understand and will comply with these Terms and Conditions.

Support Hope and Recovery Online Network (SHaRON) is an online peer support based ehealth system, supported by NHS clinical professionals, especially for people who have mental health conditions.

It connects individuals to each other and their care providers. It takes the form of an online therapeutic networking platform. It was designed by patients and clinicians at Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust in 2009.

SHaRON stemmed from a sense of frustration at the idea of ‘office hours’, when health issues can strike at any time day or night. To address this, an always available, 24/7 solution was required, and SHaRON was born.

These terms and conditions have been developed to protect the integrity and usage of SHaRON and all SHARON users are required to read and digitally sign the terms and conditions prior to accessing SHARON.

Crisis

SHaRON is not a crisis service and whilst there is some peer and clinical moderation of the site SHaRON is unable to respond to emergency situations.

In the event of you experiencing a situation requiring urgent attention you should contact your GP (out of hour’s phone 111) or named mental health professional if you have one.

The crisis / support and help tab on the toolbar has contact details.

Risk

If we observe risky or dangerous behaviours by an individual, we reserve the right to alert partner organisations as appropriate. This could include, the Police, Social Services, Crisis services and other appropriate health providers, such as General Practitioners etc.

Service Users must ensure that their referring Service has the correct contact and GP details at all times; this includes new contact details should you move out of area. You can provide this to a moderator directly through SHaRON or by emailing the Service in question. Your access will be reviewed and, if appropriate, will continue. Please be aware that in some instances this may be declined.

 If you are seen as being inactive on SHaRON for a period of 3 months or longer, your account may be locked and you will be required to make contact with the Service who referred you onto SHaRON to regain access.

Monitoring

Berkshire Healthcare NHS Trust will monitor (as appropriate) and control the use of SHaRON, which enables it to view all usage of SHaRON. This includes, but is not limited to, user details, posts made, pages accessed, files downloaded, graphic images viewed.

Users should not expect the use of or the contents of SHaRON to be private although the identity of users will not be available to other users. Users of SHaRON maintain their anonymity on the site by choosing and using an avatar that isn’t identifiable to other service users.

In the event of concerns arising or a breach of the terms and conditions you should be aware that the administration team on SHaRON and the service that invited you do keep a record and have access to the details of those they invite and the avatars chosen in order to be able to contact a user or the person who referred them if required.

Your activity on SHaRON may be added to your medical records if deemed appropriate by a Health professional.

Expectations of behaviour on SHaRON.

SHaRON may not be used for the transmitting, retrieving or storing of any communications or images, which are:

Harassing

Harassment is unwanted conduct (including insults and ‘jokes’) which relates to gender, race, sexual orientation, age, religion, disability or other similar issues. You are expected to not be offensive, hurtful, or discriminatory and not to disclose your identity, or encourage others to disclose their identity whilst on line.

Behaviour

Users are prohibited from making any comment/entry which poses a risk to clinical well- being of others. Whether the content of any entry made poses a risk to other SHaRON users will be at the discretion of Berkshire Healthcare Trust.

Defamatory

Defamation is the publication of material, which adversely affects the reputation of a person or company.

Copyright

Copyright means that the owner of such material has the exclusive right to determine how that material might be copied and used. Copyright material may not be transmitted if the owner’s permission has not been obtained.

Pornographic

Pornographic means any material of a sexual nature. As there can be no possible legitimate business use for accessing or transmitting sexually explicit materials at work, the question of whether or not such material constitutes pornography is not relevant to the use of SHaRON and all such material is prohibited.

Use of SHaRON to deliberately propagate computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses or trap door programs is prohibited.

Removal of Use

As a user of SHaRON you have a responsibility to comply with all the above terms and conditions. If something appears on the site that is in breach of the terms and conditions it will be removed and Berkshire Healthcare Trust retains the right to remove a user’s access to SHaRON with immediate effect.

All usage will be monitored as required to ensure that users are complying with the requirements of these terms and conditions.

In some instances where individual behaviours are considered ‘triggering’, insensitive, risky, inappropriate or dangerous, a SHaRON user may have their access to SHaRON temporarily or permanently removed.

Our cookie policy

This policy details how we use Cookies and what you can do to if you do not want us to place Cookies onto your computer. We use cookies on this site to track user activity and to enable various types of functionality.

This policy covers the various versions of the SHaRON therapeutic network. It does not cover all sites that can be linked to from SHaRON , so you should always be aware when you are moving to another site and read the cookie policy and privacy statement on that site.

We will not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information about you.

Turning cookies off

Some people find the idea of a website storing this type of information on their computer or mobile device intrusive. If you don’t want to receive cookies, you can modify your browser so that it notifies you when cookies are sent to it or you can refuse cookies altogether. You can also delete cookies that have already been set.

If you wish to restrict or block web browser cookies which are set on your device then you can do this through your browser settings; the Help function within your browser should tell you how.

Alternatively, you may wish to visit www.aboutcookies.org, which contains comprehensive information on how to do this on a wide variety of desktop browsers.

Your Privacy

Please note all data shared on SHaRON is saved and available for review by clinical professionals we will also share your data with our partner organisations, for our full privacy policy please look at the Berkshire Healthcare privacy policy:

https://www.berkshirehealthcare.nhs.uk/protecting-your-data-privacy-notice