Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Bench Hour is an educational service provided by Dental Apptitude (“we”, “us”, “our”). We are responsible for deciding how and why personal data is processed through Bench Hour.

For privacy enquiries or requests concerning your personal data, contact us at support@dentalapptitude.com.

2. Personal data we collect

Depending on how you use Bench Hour, we may collect and process:

• Account information: name, email address and account details.
• Professional information: GDC registration number and professional role, such as Dental Technician or Clinical Dental Technician.
• CPD information: modules completed, dates, CPD hours, knowledge-check results, reflections and information contained in certificates or other CPD records you choose to upload.
• Subscription and transaction information: subscription plan, billing status, transaction references and payment-related information provided through Stripe. We do not store your full payment card number or security code on our servers.
• Technical information: IP address, browser, device and operating-system information, security logs and information about how you use Bench Hour.

3. How we use your information

We use personal data to:

• create and manage your Bench Hour account;
• provide access to your subscription and CPD modules;
• record completed CPD activities and reflections;
• generate and maintain CPD certificates and records;
• process subscriptions and payments;
• provide customer support;
• maintain the security and reliability of the service;
• prevent fraud, misuse and unauthorised access;
• improve the service and understand how it is used; and
• comply with legal obligations where we are actually subject to them.

4. Our lawful bases

We rely on different lawful bases depending on why we are processing your information.

• Contract: where processing is necessary to provide your Bench Hour account, subscription, CPD portfolio, certificates and related services.
• Legitimate interests: where necessary to operate, secure and improve Bench Hour, prevent fraud and misuse, maintain service records and protect our business.
• Legal obligation: where we are required by law to retain or disclose particular information, including certain financial and accounting records.
• Consent: where we ask for consent for a particular processing activity, such as certain optional marketing communications or technologies where consent is legally required.

5. CPD reflections and uploaded information

Your CPD portfolio may contain information that you choose to enter about your professional practice.

Please do not include patient-identifiable information, clinical records, photographs or other confidential information about patients in reflections or uploaded documents unless you have a lawful basis and it is genuinely necessary to do so. Bench Hour is not intended to be a patient-record system.

6. Service providers

We use selected third-party service providers to operate Bench Hour. These may include:

• Supabase – database, authentication and related infrastructure.
• Stripe – payment processing and subscription billing.
• Vercel – website hosting and application infrastructure.
• Analytics providers – only where enabled and in accordance with our Cookie Policy.

These providers may process personal data on our behalf or, in some circumstances such as payment processing, act as independent controllers for particular processing activities.

7. International transfers

Some of our service providers or their sub-processors may process personal data outside the United Kingdom. Where this occurs, we use the safeguards required by applicable data protection law, which may include adequacy regulations, contractual safeguards or other lawful transfer mechanisms.

8. How long we keep your information

We keep personal data only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes for which it was collected, including providing the service, maintaining accurate records, resolving disputes, preventing fraud and complying with legal obligations.

CPD records may be retained for a period that reflects the GDC's requirements for registrants to retain their own CPD records and the possibility of CPD audits. The GDC states that registrants should retain their CPD record for five years from the end of their five-year cycle. We may therefore retain relevant Bench Hour CPD records for up to five years after the end of the relevant cycle where reasonably necessary to support the service and its users.

9. Your data protection rights

Depending on the circumstances and the lawful basis we rely on, you may have rights including:

• access to your personal data;
• correction of inaccurate or incomplete information;
• erasure of personal data in certain circumstances;
• restriction of processing in certain circumstances;
• objection to certain processing;
• data portability where applicable; and
• withdrawal of consent where processing is based on consent.

These rights are not absolute and some exceptions apply. For example, we may need to retain certain information where required by law or where we have another lawful basis for doing so.

To exercise your rights, contact support@dentalapptitude.com.

10. Complaints

If you have concerns about how we handle your personal data, please contact us first so that we can try to resolve the issue.

You also have the right to complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK's data protection regulator.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes to Bench Hour, our service providers or applicable law. The latest version will always be published on this page.