Privacy notice
Draft pending legal review. This notice has not yet been reviewed by a qualified lawyer in Ireland. It describes how Shifa is intended to handle your information and will be finalised before the platform serves real patients.
What we hold
- Who you are: name, mobile number, and age where you give it.
- What you told us: the symptoms you entered and the answers you gave during a check.
- Your care: appointments, consultation records, prescriptions and test results.
- Payments: the amount, method and outcome. We never hold your card number.
Why we hold it
To help you understand your symptom, to arrange and deliver your care, to take payment, to keep the platform safe, and to meet legal and professional obligations.
We use anonymised, aggregated information to check whether our symptom guidance sends people to the right place. That work never identifies you.
Who can see it
The doctor you book with sees what they need to treat you safely. Nobody else sees your health record unless you share it, and you choose what to include and for how long.
Our staff do not have standing access to consultation notes or health records. Where access is needed to resolve a problem you have raised, it is limited, recorded and available to you in your record access history.
How long we keep it
Medical records are kept for the minimum period required of clinicians in Ireland, and longer where a patient was a child at the time of treatment. Booking and payment records are kept as long as tax and consumer protection rules require.
This limits deletion. You can ask us to delete your account and the information that is not part of a medical or financial record. We cannot delete a medical record before its statutory retention period ends, because the law requires the clinician to keep it. We will always tell you which parts we cannot remove and why.
Shifa runs retention checks for records it can identify and records an audit trail when disposal is enabled and carried out. If the clinical minimum, data-protection maximum or legal basis for a category has not been signed off, we do not delete that category silently; it is held for governance review instead.
Your choices
- See what we hold about you, and get a copy.
- Correct anything that is wrong.
- Withdraw a sharing permission at any time, which takes effect immediately.
- Choose how we contact you about appointments.
- Ask for deletion, subject to the retention rules above.
Keeping it safe
Information is encrypted in transit and at rest, access is restricted to those who need it, and access to health information is logged. If a breach affects you, we will tell you what happened and what to do.