Review policy

This is the versioned policy document that every moderation decision in this directory records against. This is policy version 1.1, and it is the version in force.

Who moderates, and how quickly

Abhishek Bakshi is the named moderator for this directory and is accountable for the review queue. Every decision below is taken by a person, recorded against the version of this page in force at the time, and attributable to the moderator who took it.

Commitment	Target
Triage — every report is read and classified as emergency, substantive or vexatious	2 business days
Decision — the outcome, with a reason, to both parties	10 business days
Emergency hold — for disclosure of private information, threats, impersonation, or a court or regulator order only	24 hours
Right of reply from a verified claim	1 business day
Appeal — reheard from the beginning, not a review of the first decision	10 business days

Moderation is currently a roster of one, and this page will not promise otherwise: an appeal is reheard from the beginning by the same moderator rather than by a second one, and where a genuinely independent decision is required — a legal notice, or an appeal against the moderator's own conduct — it is escalated to the operator and is never actioned by the moderator alone. If you have not had an answer within the target above, reply to the acknowledgement you were sent and it will be escalated.

Everything is read before it is published. There is no automatic publication path in this directory — not for a first review, not for a long-standing reviewer, not for a clinic's reply, at any trust level. Automated screening decides only whether something is obvious spam or goes to a person; it can never publish anything. Anything alleging clinical harm is held and cannot be published by the ordinary moderation action at all, whatever else is in the queue.

Review submission is not open yet. The moderation queue and console are live and the commitments above are in force; the submission form stays closed until the operator opens it. This page states the rules that apply the moment it does.

Who may write a review

Reviews come from patients and their immediate family, about care they actually received. A review must relate to a real visit to the clinic named. An account is required, because a clinic that disputes a review has the right to have it looked at, and that needs a reachable author. Your name is shown as you choose it; your email address never is.

What is refused

Anything identifying a patient other than the author — names, contact details or clinical detail about a third party.
Allegations of criminal conduct or clinical negligence. These belong with the medical council or the courts, not a directory; we will point you at the right body.
Reviews written by staff, competitors or anyone with an undisclosed commercial interest.
Content posted to a doctor's profile that is actually about the clinic's administration, and the reverse. It is moved rather than deleted.

What happens to a submitted review

Every review is screened and then read by a person before publication. Nothing publishes automatically, at any reviewer trust level, about a clinic or a clinician. A published review can later be disputed, held or removed, and every one of those transitions is recorded with the moderator who made it, the reason, and the version of this page in force at the time.

State	On the page?	What it means
Screening	No	Submitted; automated checks running.
Awaiting review	No	Checks finished; waiting for the moderator.
Published	Yes	Live on the clinic or doctor page.
Rejected	No	Failed this policy at intake. You are told why and may appeal once.
Reported	Yes	Published, then reported. It stays on the page while it is assessed.
Under dispute	Yes	A substantive takedown has been filed. It stays on the page while it is assessed, and both parties are contacted.
Held	No	Temporarily off the page pending resolution. Reversible.
Withdrawn	No	The author removed it.
Removed	No	A final decision to take it down. The record of it is kept.

A review being reported does not take it off the page. Hiding a review the moment somebody objects is how true negative reviews are made to disappear, so it does not happen here — except for disclosure of private information, threats, impersonation, or a court or regulator order.

Average ratings

An average rating is shown only once a listing has at least three published reviews. A five-star average over one review is technically true and practically misleading, so it is not displayed and not marked up. A group or chain page never shows an aggregate rating at all — a chain-level score is an arithmetic artefact, not something anyone reviewed.

Right of reply

The right of reply opens the moment a clinic claims its profile. A claim is verified on two independent checks — a round trip to an email address at the organisation's own domain, a callback to the publicly listed phone number, or a document check. One is not enough, and the database refuses to record a verified claim that does not carry two.

A verified claimant may reply once to any review of that profile. The reply publishes directly beneath the review, attributed by name and role and labelled as a response from the business. It never displaces the review, never changes its rating and never re-orders it. Replies are read within one business day.

A reply containing anything about the patient is blocked, not moderated. Not their name, not their contact details, not their treatment, not their dates of attendance, not whether they were a patient at all. A clinic answering "the wait was three hours" with a detail from somebody's file is a confidentiality breach this directory would have published, so publication of such a reply is refused by the database rather than left to judgement. Repeated attempts end the claim.

A claimant who wants a correction rather than a rebuttal uses the correction path, which changes the record and does not touch the review.

What a clinic cannot do

Move, hide, reorder or remove a review about itself, in any direction. A verified claim carries no power over the state of a review.
Suppress a rating or an average.
Reply anonymously, or reply on a profile it has not verified.

What a moderator cannot do

Change what a reviewer wrote. The only text-level power is redaction of personal information, which leaves a visible marker, a recorded reason and a full before-and-after record.
Remove anything permanently. A moderator can take a review off the page; making that final is a separate, higher authority — because a moderator who could remove permanently could end a dispute by ending the record of it.
Alter or delete a moderation record. The application has no ability to update or delete those rows at all; that is a database guarantee, not a policy.

Getting a review removed

If a review is factually wrong, breaches this policy, or is not from a patient at all, report it from the review itself, or see corrections. A disputed review is marked as disputed while it is investigated rather than silently hidden.

This directory adjudicates policy compliance and verifiability, not truth. It is not equipped to determine whether a clinic was in fact negligent, and it does not pretend to be.

"The author was never a patient" is the ground most often used to remove true negative reviews, so it has its own procedure. The reviewer is asked privately for one verification signal — an appointment date, a redacted receipt, an appointment confirmation. Nothing they send is ever published or shown to the clinic. If they provide it, the review is restored and the clinic is told only that the visit was verified, with no detail. If they do not respond within seven days the review is removed, and the row and its full history are kept. A clinic that files repeated unfounded reports has that pattern recorded, and its claim can be revoked for abuse of the process.

Standing commitments

A review is never removed for being negative.
The grounds on which a review can be removed are the ones published above, and no others.
Both parties are told the outcome and the reason.
A removed review leaves a permanent internal record; it is never erased.
The number of removals per clinic is visible to the moderator, so a pattern of suppression surfaces.

Editorial note. Registry details are sourced from the National ART & Surrogacy Registry and corroborated against what the clinic publishes. Opening hours are the clinic's own, cited to its website. Partner plans unlock more detail but never change the methodology. Success rates are not published here — read how we rank.

Verified against cited public sources
No paid placement, ever