Abuse and appeals policy
Draft pending legal review. This policy has not yet been reviewed by a qualified lawyer in Ireland and will be finalised before the platform serves real patients.
Shifa must be safe for patients, clinicians and staff. We use rules, reports and other checks to find behaviour that may harm people, hide the truth, misuse money or damage trust. A signal is not proof by itself. It is reviewed before enforcement action is recorded.
What is not allowed
You must not use Shifa in a way that harms other people, tricks the platform or hides important facts. This includes:
- Trying to take over an account, using stolen passwords or hiding an unusual device.
- Testing cards, making unusual payment attempts, or trying to avoid payment checks.
- Making fake, duplicate, paid or pushed reviews, or asking someone to change a review for a reward.
- Holding or cancelling many appointment slots in a way that stops other patients booking.
- Creating self-referrals or reward farming through referral or promotion offers.
- Posting threats, abuse, hate, private health details or pressure in reviews or messages.
- Putting identifiers such as a PPSN, Eircode, phone number or medical record number in public review text.
What action we may take
If a reviewed integrity signal supports action, we record the evidence, the reason, who decided it, when it starts and whether it expires. Depending on the risk, we may:
- Limit or slow requests for a time.
- Ask for an extra sign-in or security check.
- Hold, remove or refuse to publish a review.
- Take back a reward linked to referral abuse.
- Require payment before future bookings after repeated booking abuse.
- Suspend an account or a provider profile while the issue is reviewed.
Abuse-policy enforcement actions are recorded so they can be reversed when an appeal succeeds. A reversal may lift a restriction, restore a wrongly removed item, correct the record, or end an action that would otherwise continue.
How to appeal
If your account, review, reward or profile is restricted and you think we got it wrong, you can appeal. Use the appeal link in the notice if one is shown. If there is no link, contact us or use the complaints page and include the reference from the notice.
Tell us what happened, what you think is wrong, and any evidence you want us to check. Do not include extra health details unless they are needed to explain the appeal.
We record the appeal as submitted. A reviewer checks the original signal, the evidence and your explanation. The final outcome is either upheld, which means the action stays, or overturned, which means the action is reversed where it still has an effect.
Clinical misconduct is handled differently
Shifa does not decide whether a clinician has provided good care, diagnose anyone or provide clinical care. Reports about unsafe clinical practice, professional behaviour or a possible breach of a clinician's duties are routed to clinical governance instead of being treated as platform abuse.
That means a suspected clinical misconduct signal is marked for clinical governance review. It cannot be used to create a normal fraud or abuse enforcement action in the integrity workflow. You may also raise concerns about clinical care with the clinician, the facility, the HSE where relevant, or the Irish Medical Council.