Who Can See Children’s Medical and Allergy Information
A child's allergies, medical notes and security code are the most sensitive records your church keeps. TimelyChurch is built so the people who need that information at the moment they need it have it -- and nobody else can browse it.
The Check-In permissions
Check-In access is set per role. On the Check-In module, a role can have three permissions:
| Permission | What it allows | Who normally has it |
|---|---|---|
| View | See the Check-In Station, sessions, and rosters. | Anyone who helps with check-in |
| Use | Operate a station: look a family up while a session is open, check children in and out, print labels. Allergies and medical notes appear for the child being checked in, and on their label. | Check-in volunteers, team members, team leaders |
| Manage | Everything in Use, plus check-in settings, deleting and renaming sessions, consent forms, closing stale check-ins, releasing children from the Need Attention page, and lockdown. | Children's ministry director, Safety Officers, administrators |
A volunteer at the door can serve a child safely without being able to browse other families' records.
What this means in practice
- A station's family lookup only works while a check-in session is open. It needs the last 4 or more digits of a phone number (or at least 3 letters of a name), shows names, photos, ages and classes only, and -- when several households match -- shows just the household names until the right one is picked.
- Allergies and medical notes appear only once a person is selected for check-in, and pickups and emergency contacts only for the children just checked in. See The Check-In Process.
- Security codes, pickup authorization and guardian contacts follow the same rule: shown for the child in front of you, not browsable in bulk. Security codes are left out of check-in exports.
- A parent always sees their own child's record through the family portal.
- Profile update links are never generated for a minor. A guardian updates a child's record from the family portal instead.
- Looking up people in the People directory is a separate permission (People & Families), not part of Check-In.
Reviewing who has access at your church
Go to Administration > Roles & Permissions and open each role. On the Check-In module you will see which of View, Use, and Manage it holds.
A good rule of thumb: only the people who run children's ministry need Manage. Everyone else who helps at the door needs View and Use only. If a role has Manage and does not need it, remove it -- the volunteers in that role can still check children in exactly as before.
If you collect medical information
For a child, allergy and medical information (such as the Allergies and Medical Conditions custom fields) can be saved only after a parent or guardian has given consent. A parent gives consent in the family portal when editing their child's medical information. Until then, the child's profile shows a Consent not on file badge. See Person Profile Overview.
Each time a child's allergy or medical notes are shown during check-in, the access is logged.
Related
- Security Codes, Labels, and Child Safety -- how the codes and labels work
- Check-In History, Privacy, and Retention -- how long check-in records are kept and how to delete them
- Who Can See Giving and Donations -- the same principle applied to money