Trust is the product, so here is how it works

Six checks make up verification. A provider only carries the Verified Professional badge once all six are complete, and you can click that badge anywhere on Ventcare to see the individual results and the date of the last review.

1. 1. Identity

   A government ID is matched to the name and photo on the profile.

2. 2. Professional qualification

   Original degrees, diplomas or certificates are sighted and recorded.

3. 3. Professional registration

   Registration is confirmed with the stated professional body.

4. 4. Practice information

   Practising licence and practice or centre details are checked.

5. 5. Experience

   Stated years of practice and areas of work are corroborated.

6. 6. Profile & service review

   The Ventcare team reviews the wording, services and pricing shown to clients.

Ongoing quality monitoring. Verification is re-reviewed rather than granted once: we track session outcomes, cancellations, complaints and verified reviews, and we can suspend a listing at any time while a concern is investigated.

Verification confirms identity, qualification, registration and practice details. It is not a clinical endorsement and not a promise of any particular outcome.

We collect what is needed to match you with care, take payment and run your appointments: your name, contact details, the answers you choose to give the Support Navigator, and your booking and payment history.

Your Support Navigator answers, mood entries, assessments and safety plans belong to you. They are stored against your account only, and are not shown to providers unless you book with them or choose to share.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not use your mental-health information for advertising.

A provider sees the details you submit when you book with them, plus anything you share in session or in messages. Other providers cannot see it.

A provider's phone number and physical address are released to you only after your session is paid for — the same access rule works in the other direction, protecting providers from unpaid contact scraping.

If your care is funded by an employer or school, they fund the care and never see who used it. Employer reporting is aggregate only, and figures are withheld entirely below a minimum group size so individuals cannot be identified.

Session notes, care plans and assessments are held under per-row access rules in the database, not just hidden in the interface. A request that is not yours simply returns nothing.

• Clients see their own records, receipts and shared care plans.
• Providers see only the clients who booked with them.
• Centre admins see only their own centre's operational information.
• Employers and schools see aggregated programme figures only.
• Ventcare staff access is limited by role and recorded in an audit log.

Providers listing on Ventcare agree to:

• practise only within their qualifications, registration and scope;
• keep registration and practising licence current;
• hold client information in confidence and keep accurate records;
• publish honest pricing, session length and cancellation terms;
• refer on, or escalate, when a client's needs fall outside their scope;
• follow Kenyan law and their professional body's code of conduct.

Listings that breach these standards are suspended. Where a professional body is involved, we support the client in reporting to it.

Where a client is a child or a young person, or where there is a risk of serious harm, additional steps apply: consent from a parent or guardian for under-18 care, escalation of risk flags to the Ventcare care team, and referral to appropriate services.

Confidentiality can be limited where there is a serious and immediate risk to life, or a legal obligation to disclose. A provider will explain this to you at the start of care.

To raise a safeguarding concern, email notify@ventcare.org with "Safeguarding" in the subject line, or call 0713 668 405.

Tell us what happened through the contact form or by email. We acknowledge complaints and tell you what we intend to do about them. Where a clinical or professional standard may have been breached, we can suspend the listing while we look into it and help you take the matter to the relevant professional body.

Ventcare is built to be usable with a keyboard alone and with a screen reader: semantic headings and landmarks, labelled form fields, visible focus outlines, readable contrast, and large tap targets on phones. Pages are designed to work on modest Kenyan mobile data connections.

If something is hard to use with your assistive technology, tell us and we will treat it as a defect, not a request.

You can ask us to:

• show you a copy of the information we hold about you;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete your account and personal information;
• stop sending you reminders or marketing messages.

Email notify@ventcare.org from your account address and we will act on it. Some records are kept after deletion where the law requires it — payment and tax records in particular — and clinical notes are kept for the period a provider's professional body requires. Everything else is removed.

Practices actually in place today:

• all traffic encrypted in transit; data encrypted at rest by our cloud provider;
• per-row database access rules enforced on every request, not in the interface;
• staff sign-in restricted to Ventcare work accounts, with role-based access;
• administrative actions written to an audit log;
• payments handled through the M-Pesa provider — we never store card or PIN data;
• regular automated security review of the database and dependencies.

If a breach occurs, we contain it, assess what information was involved, notify affected users and the relevant authority without undue delay, and publish what we changed. We would rather tell you plainly than quietly.

• We do not diagnose. The Support Navigator is not a clinician or a test.
• We do not guarantee treatment outcomes.
• We do not say a provider accepts a particular insurance or medical cover unless it has been confirmed.
• We do not publish reviews from people who have not completed a booking.
• We are not an emergency service. If life is in danger, call 999, or see urgent help for Kenyan crisis lines.