Compliance & Policies

Delivering a safe, compliant canine assisted therapy service

Therapy Pets endeavour to deliver a safe, professional and enjoyable therapy session and have therefore developed a comprehensive onboarding process that allows you to engage our services with confidence and ease.

Professional Qualifications

Doctor Watson is a qualified Therapy dog and his temperament has been assessed and certified. You can view his certificate here and when you complete our onboarding you will be sent a copy for your files.

Therapy Dog Certificate

Public Liability Insurance For Therapy Dogs and our Guinea Pigs

We hold specialist Dog Therapy and Guinea Pigs Insurance that covers all our pet therapy services and activities. This includes Public Liability up to £5,000,000. We supply all our clients with a copy of our certificates for inspection which can be shared with agency inspectors.

Safeguarding

In advance of commencing our work, we will ask for the details of your dedicated Safeguarding Officer and ask for their contact numbers in and out of working hours. We also ask for your Safeguarding Statement or Policy and Procedures and always work within those guidelines. We hold current DBS certification and can let your organisation take and keep a copy for your records upon request.

Safeguarding Vulnerable Adults

We take safeguarding extremely seriously and appreciate that we are working with vulnerable adults. We have therefore completed the Safeguarding Vulnerable Adults (SOVA) Level 2 course to acquire the skills needed to safeguard people that are at higher risk of abuse. We are fully conversant with the legislation regarding vulnerable adults, and mental capacity and will respond to disclosures in-line with your safeguarding processes in place.

Client Confidentiality

GDPR

General Data Protection Rules (GDPR), introduced in the UK and EU in May 2018 means any information held must be with permission and for a legitimate reason and accessible to the data subject for their control. Your contact information will not be shared with third-parties. If you would like to see what information we hold or would like this removed from our system please email hello@therapypets.co.uk and we will be happy to facilitate your request.

Beyond GDPR, working in vulnerable communities requires us to adopt a highly professional approach to keeping sensitive information we may hear about your clients or your organisation. For this reason, we guarantee that any information given to us or inadvertently overheard will never be shared. The exception will be if this is a legitimate safeguarding issue and in that situation, the appropriate procedures will be followed.

Photography & Social Media

While it’s lovely for us to to be able to share happy memories of our therapy sessions with our clients and their families, we will only allow the therapy facility to take photographs. Therapy Pets and our employees under no circumstances will take any photos of vulnerable people on a personal phone or device. Instead, we ask that if you take some photos after you have gained all the necessary consents, will you kindly share them with us?

Our Onboarding Process

Memorandum Of Understanding

Our MOU is not legally binding but rather a sort of a handshake between all parties involved in the operation of our therapy dog visiting your facility. The document will outline our partnership and commitments to each other, once agreed this will be signed by all parties.

It will include:

A description of our service and its benefits.
General, health & safety & legislation standards.
Commitment required from the therapy setting/facility.
Our commitment to the welfare, training & behaviour of our dog.

Risk-Assessment

As a business we have a responsibility to prepare a Risk-Assessment ahead of agreeing to our services. It may be you haven't prepared a risk assessment for a dog visitor before and unsure of the associated risks or how they can be mitigated. We will prepare a simple document for you to review ahead of our visit.

As well as consent under data protection rules, we need to gain consent for the delivery of our service to individual clients. This is especially important if we work with children under the age of 18. We will need to gain parental or guardian consent for every child we work with. With vulnerable young people and adults who are unable for whatever reason to provide consent themselves, we then rely on carers, social workers or members of the family who can provide this on their behalf.

As an establishment, rather than an individual consent, you may provide us with a single consent that covers everyone. We have made it easy for you to obtain consent for us to deliver our service with our Therapy Pet Consent Form.

Consent is important when bringing an animal together with a new human for the following reasons:

The person may have a fear of animals (this can be alleviated with a lot of work of course but the situation must be known and consent given in advance of any therapy session).
The person may have a mild to serious allergy to pet fur or dander.
The person may have a severely suppressed immune system or illness that may put them at risk of cross-infection from us or our animals.
The person may just dislike dogs.

Consent Forms

Our Fees & Terms

Animal Welfare and Session Times

Our time is limited with our therapy pets working a maximum of 2 hours per day therefore we advise booking early to avoid disappointment. Each session with our therapy dog will last one hour, if more time is required on the same day we must factor in the appropriate rest for our dog in a quiet solitary place.

If for any reason our therapy pets are unwell and we cannot attend, we will endeavour to provide you with as much notice as possible to rearrange your session. If we cannot fulfil our obligations due to their longterm illness and we do not have an alternative dog available, you will be reimbursed in full for all remaining sessions.

Membership Plans

We want our clients to be able to set up regular timetables for our visits and we will always do our best to accommodate your preferred day and time. Because we have such limited working hours with our animals please understand we can only offer this on a first-come basis. If you decide on a weekly or monthly visit your payments will be recurring until you cancel, which you can do at any time with a 7-day notice period. We do ask however you to email us to let us know with as much notice as possible and the reason why.Please note that weekly memberships will be paused for our therapy dog to take his annual holiday allowance.

Travel Costs

Therapy Pets is located in Edinburgh and Travel time and expenses are included in our fees within a 15-mile radius of our nearest base. Additional miles will incur fees priced at the Inland Revenue rate of 45p per mile and return travel time is charged at £30 per hour.

Payments

All invoices will be issued at the time of booking with payment due in full at this time. We accept cash, cheque, and bank transfers.

Cancellations & Refunds

We ask for a minimum of 48 hours' notice for cancellations and postponements, any cancellations outside this notice period will be charged in full. To cancel or postpone a booking, please contact us by email, telephone or text at your earliest opportunity and within the cancellation notice period. You can change the date of a booking online within 3 days of your booked session.

There may be an occasion when we are required to amend your booking or cancel the booking altogether, in such case we will give you as much notice as possible and fully refund your booking. Therapy Pets will not be however be responsible for any costs, expenses or losses incurred arising from this type of amendment or cancellation.