1. What a listing is
A paid, clearly labelled, structured factual entry for a clinic, published in a listings section that sits outside editorial.
It is not a review. It is not a rating. It is not a ranking. It is not an endorsement, and it is not evidence that this publication thinks anything at all about the clinic, because we do not assess clinics.
What it is: a set of facts that a patient would otherwise have to extract by asking, published in a consistent format so that they can be compared across the listings that exist.
2. The criteria, which are the whole point
Every listing publishes the same fields, and every field is one a patient can verify independently. A clinic that will not state one of them cannot be listed.
- Registration status. Whether the service is registered with Healthcare Improvement Scotland, and if not, the clinic's own statement of why not.
- Named responsible professional. The regulated healthcare professional responsible for the service, their profession and their public registration number.
- Prescriber arrangements. Who prescribes any prescription only medicine used, whether that person assesses patients in person, and whether they are on site.
- Complications policy. Whether a written policy exists, who assesses a complication, the stated response time, and the out of hours arrangement.
- Hyaluronidase. Whether it is held on the premises and who can prescribe it.
- Correction policy. Whether reviews are included, whether adjustments are charged, and what dissolving costs.
- Indemnity. Confirmation that professional indemnity is held and that it covers the procedures offered.
- Pricing transparency. Whether prices are published openly, and where.
Every one of those is checkable by the reader. That is the design principle: a listing is a set of claims a clinic has put its name to in public, not a set of adjectives we have agreed to print.
3. How it is marked and separated
Listings appear only in the listings section. They are labelled as paid at the top of the section and on each entry. They carry no star ratings, no scores and no editorial commentary.
They are ordered in a way that cannot be read as a ranking, and never by amount paid. No listing appears inside an article. No article links to a listing customer. Buying a listing does not buy a mention anywhere else on this site, and it cannot change a price band, a criterion, a warning or a word of editorial.
If a listing customer asks for editorial coverage, the answer is no, and repeated asking ends the listing.
4. What we will not do, at any price
We will not rank listings. We will not rate them. We will not describe a listed clinic as recommended, trusted, approved, verified by us, or best for anything.
We will not list a clinic that refuses to state one of the criteria fields. We will not list a clinic making claims that breach the advertising rules on prescription only medicines. We will not list a service that presents an unlicensed injectable product as an approved treatment.
We will not accept payment to remove or soften anything in editorial, and we will not tell a listing customer what is coming.
5. What we verify, and what we do not
This matters and we would rather overstate the limits than the checks.
We check that the stated registration and registration numbers correspond to entries on the relevant public registers, because those are public and checkable in minutes. Everything else in a listing is the clinic's own statement, published as its statement, and identified as such.
We do not inspect premises. We do not audit complications policies in operation. We do not observe consultations, review records or follow patients up. We are not a regulator and we do not pretend to be one.
A listing therefore tells you what a clinic is willing to state publicly against a fixed set of questions. That is genuinely useful and it is considerably less than an assessment, and both halves of that sentence are printed on the listings section itself.
6. Why sell listings at all
Because a publication needs a revenue line that does not corrupt it, and this is the one that fits.
An advertising network would put whoever bids most in front of a reader we have just told to be careful. An affiliate arrangement would give us a financial interest in you buying treatment. Lead generation would make us a sales channel wearing an editorial coat. Each of those is normal in this sector and each would change what this site is for.
A listing sold on disclosed, verifiable criteria, marked as paid, ordered without ranking and carrying no endorsement is the version we can operate without lying to anybody. If it ever stops being that, the correct response is to stop selling it.
7. The current position
No paid listings are published at the time of writing. When they are, they will appear in a listings section, labelled as paid, under the terms on this page, and this paragraph will say so.
We would rather publish nothing than publish a section that misrepresents itself, and a listings section with one entry that reads as an endorsement would be worse than no section at all.
8. Enquiries
Clinics interested in a listing should use the contact form and select the listing enquiry option. You will be sent the criteria form. If you cannot answer every field, we cannot list you, and that is not a negotiation.
Readers who think a published listing contains a claim that is not accurate should tell us, and we will check the checkable parts and put the question to the clinic. A listing that turns out to contain a false statement is removed.