Privacy Policy

Health Access Institute ("the Institute", "we", "us") is a healthcare training institution based at Oyarifa, Accra, Ghana. When you apply to us, study with us, or use our online portals, we decide how your personal information is handled. In the language of Ghana's Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843), that makes us the data controller for that information.

This policy explains what we collect, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the rights you have over it. It covers our website and the applicant, student, lecturer and staff portals operated under it.

Information you give us when you apply

• Your full name, date of birth, gender and nationality
• Contact details, including email address, telephone number and postal or residential address
• Guardian, sponsor or next-of-kin details where the application form requests them
• Your previous school, qualifications and examination results
• A passport photograph, and scanned copies of certificates, result slips and identification you upload to support your application

Information created while you study

• Your programme, cohort, semester and course registrations
• Attendance, assessment scores, examination results and resit records
• Transcripts, awards and graduation records
• Correspondence between you and academic or administrative staff

Billing and payment records

• Bills raised against your account and the fee structure they were generated from
• Payments received, receipts issued and how each payment was allocated
• Scholarship, discount or payment-plan arrangements that apply to you

Account and technical information

• The credentials you use to sign in to a portal, and records of your sign-in activity
• Technical information sent by your device, such as browser type, device type and IP address
• Cookies and similar storage needed to keep you signed in and to keep the service secure

We use the information described above to:

• Assess your application and decide whether to make you an offer
• Register you, deliver teaching, and administer assessments and examinations
• Produce your results, transcripts, certificates and other academic records
• Raise bills, collect fees, issue receipts and maintain your financial account
• Contact you about your application, your studies, your fees and institutional notices
• Meet our reporting and accreditation obligations to bodies such as the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission and the Pharmacy Council
• Keep our systems secure, investigate misuse, and comply with the law

We do not use your personal information to build advertising profiles, and we do not make decisions about you by automated means alone.

Act 843 requires us to have a proper basis for processing your data. Depending on the information, we rely on one of the following.

• Performance of a contract — processing needed to assess your application and to deliver the programme you enrolled on.
• Legal and regulatory obligation — records we are required to keep, and returns we are required to make to regulators and tax authorities.
• Legitimate interest — running the Institute safely and efficiently, including securing our systems and recovering unpaid fees.
• Consent — where we ask for it specifically, such as optional communications. You may withdraw consent at any time without affecting processing already carried out.

Online fee payments are processed by Paystack, a licensed payment service provider. When you pay, your card or mobile-money details are entered directly into Paystack's systems.

The Institute does not collect, see or store your full card number, PIN or mobile-money credentials. We receive only the outcome of the transaction — the amount, the reference and whether it succeeded — which we use to update your account and issue your receipt.

Paystack handles the payment details you enter under its own privacy policy and its obligations as a payment processor.

We share personal information only where there is a reason to, namely with:

• Regulators and accreditation bodies, including the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission and the Pharmacy Council, where we are required to report or to verify an award
• Our payment processor, to take payment and confirm it
• Service providers who host our systems or send communications on our behalf, acting on our instructions and not for their own purposes
• Clinical and industry partners hosting a practical attachment that forms part of your programme, limited to what the placement requires
• Courts, law-enforcement or other authorities where we are legally obliged to disclose

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not disclose it to third parties for their own marketing.

We keep personal information for as long as it is needed for the purposes set out in this policy, and for as long as the law requires.

• Academic records — results, transcripts and awards are retained on a long-term basis, because former students rely on us to verify their qualifications for the rest of their careers.
• Financial records — retained for the period required by tax, audit and company law.
• Applications that do not lead to enrolment — retained for a limited period so that we can answer queries and support a re-application, then deleted or anonymised.
• Portal and technical logs — retained for a short period for security and troubleshooting.

Under the Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843), you have the right to:

• Ask what personal information we hold about you, and receive a copy of it
• Have inaccurate or incomplete information corrected
• Ask us to delete or stop processing information where we no longer have grounds to keep it
• Object to processing carried out on the basis of our legitimate interests
• Withdraw any consent you previously gave

To exercise any of these rights, write to us at info@haighana.edu.gh. We will respond within the timeframe set by law. Where we are legally required to retain something — an examination record, for instance — we will explain why we cannot delete it.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your information, you may complain to the Data Protection Commission of Ghana.

Access to student and applicant records is restricted to staff whose role requires it, and our portals enforce role-based permissions. Information sent between your browser and our systems is encrypted in transit.

You are responsible for keeping your portal password confidential. Please tell us immediately if you believe your account has been accessed by someone else. No system can be guaranteed completely secure, and we cannot promise absolute security of information transmitted over the internet.

Our portals use cookies and similar browser storage that are strictly necessary to operate the service — principally to keep you signed in, to remember your preferences, and to protect against fraudulent requests.

Blocking these cookies will prevent you from signing in. If we later introduce analytics or other non-essential cookies, we will update this policy and ask for your consent first.

Some of our applicants are under 18 at the point of application. Where that is the case, we expect a parent or guardian to be involved in the application and to consent to the processing described here. A parent or guardian may exercise the rights above on the applicant's behalf.

We may update this policy as our programmes, systems or legal obligations change. The effective date at the top of this page shows when the current version took effect. Where a change materially affects how we use your information, we will bring it to your attention directly.

For any question about this policy or about how your information is handled, contact Health Access Institute at info@haighana.edu.gh or +233 24 428 0284. Our address is Oyarifa, Accra, Ghana.