1. What's a Cookie, Anyway?
It's a small text file. Your browser saves it when you visit a website, and it helps that site remember small details about your visit, what you clicked, whether you filled in a form, how you got there. Some cookies vanish the moment you close your browser. Others hang around for weeks or months and recognise you next time you're back.
2. Why We Use Them
A few reasons, really. We use cookies to keep the website running smoothly, to see how people actually use our GP and dermatology pages, and to make sure what you're seeing is useful rather than random. If we notice, say, that mole checks or blood test pages get a lot of visits, that tells us something worth acting on.
3. The Cookies We Use
Essential Cookies
These keep the site working. Without them, things like our booking form just wouldn't function properly. They're not optional on our end, but we're not hiding them either, they're here because the site needs them.
Analytics and Performance Cookies
We use tools like Google Analytics to get a feel for how people move around the site, which pages they spend time on, where they leave, what catches their attention. It's all anonymous and grouped together, so no, we can't tell it's specifically you. It just helps us fix what's clunky and build on what's working.
Functionality Cookies
These remember small choices you've made, so you're not starting from scratch every visit. Handy if you're comparing a few of our services before deciding what to book.
Marketing and Social Media Cookies
Click through to our Facebook, X, LinkedIn, or Instagram, or sign up for our Health Insights emails, and cookies from those platforms might get set too. They're used to track engagement and sometimes to shape what ads or content you see elsewhere. We don't control those, so it's worth a look at each platform's own policy if you want the full story.
4. Cookies From Other Companies
Not every cookie on our site comes from us directly. Google Analytics is one example, our social media buttons are another. These are set by the companies behind them, following their own rules, so if you want the details, Google's Privacy & Terms page or the relevant platform's policy is where to look.
5. Turning Cookies Off
Up to you, entirely. Your browser settings let you see what cookies are stored, delete them, or block certain kinds altogether. Just know that switching off the essential ones might break parts of the site, our booking form, for instance, may stop working properly. Need help doing this on your specific browser? A site like www.aboutcookies.org walks you through it.
6. How Long They Stick Around
Depends on the cookie. Session ones disappear when you shut your browser. Persistent ones stay longer, days in some cases, months in others, depending on what they're doing. Analytics cookies tend to hang on longer than functionality ones, since they're built to spot you coming back.
7. If This Page Changes
We might update this now and then, a new tool gets added to the site, a rule changes, or we just tidy things up. Whenever that happens, we'll update the date at the top, so it's worth a glance if you're ever unsure.
8. Your Rights
Under the UK GDPR and PECR, you can control non-essential cookies and pull back your consent whenever you like, through your browser or a cookie tool on our site, if we've got one running. For the bigger picture on how we handle your data, our Privacy Policy covers that separately.
9. Get in Touch
Question about cookies, or your data more broadly? Ask away.
- Email: hello@aviorahealth.co.uk
- Location: Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
- Website: aviorahealth.co.uk
Thanks for reading this far. We'd like you to feel just as comfortable browsing our site as you would sitting in our clinic.