How we verify providers

• Care Quality Commission (CQC): England: clinics and other independent healthcare services.
• General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC): Pharmacies across Great Britain, including online pharmacies.
• Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS): Independent clinics in Scotland.
• Healthcare Inspectorate Wales (HIW): Independent clinics in Wales.

We don’t yet have data for Northern Ireland’s regulator (RQIA), so providers based there are not covered.

1. We find candidates. We start from independent healthcare services registered with the CQC (including locations registered for slimming clinic services that list a website) and pharmacies on the GPhC register. We also add known online pharmacy and clinic brands, and find clinics through map searches. Wherever a candidate comes from, it still has to match a registration.
2. We read the provider’s own website. Our crawler fetches each site, including its about, contact and legal pages.
3. We check what it actually offers. An automated classifier judges whether the business genuinely provides a treatment (weight-loss medicines, hormone therapy, IV therapy), rather than just mentioning it in a blog post. In a small test (68 examples, labelled by a second AI model rather than by people), about 94% of the treatments it flagged were correct. Treat it as a guide, and confirm with the provider.
4. We match it to a registration (see below). No match, no listing.
5. We remove the rest: duplicates, NHS services, businesses that aren’t UK-based, and anything that isn’t a treatment provider.

• CQC: the website address on the CQC’s record matches the provider’s website. For clinics registered for slimming services, the CQC registration is the evidence of a weight management service; it doesn’t confirm which medicines they prescribe, so we’re confirming that by contacting each clinic.
• GPhC: online pharmacies must show their GPhC registration number, and we check the number printed on the site against the register. If the number belongs to a different pharmacy (common when a brand uses a partner to dispense), the record says “Dispensed by” and names that pharmacy, so you know who actually supplies your medicine. Where no number is shown, we match a pharmacy by its name and postcode, or, for online-only pharmacies, by a near-exact name.
• HIS and HIW: the provider’s name and postcode match a registered service in Scotland or Wales.
• Practising under another provider: some clinics work under another provider’s CQC registration rather than holding their own. The record says so and names that provider.

Matching is automated. We don’t hand-review every listing, which is why each record links straight to the register entry so you can confirm it in seconds.

• The registration, with its number and a link to the regulator’s own page for it.
• The CQC rating and its date, for CQC-registered clinics. We flag ratings more than five years old. Other regulators don’t publish a comparable rating.
• The date we last matched it to the register.
• Registered doctors: where a provider prints a doctor’s GMC number on its site, we check it on the GMC register and show whether that doctor is licensed to practise.
• The Google rating, clearly labelled as Google’s, not our verification.

A listing has to earn its place. When we last counted (27 October 2026), we had reviewed more than 1,800 businesses and left out over 1,000. The most common reasons: we couldn’t match a registration (472), or the business doesn’t offer a relevant treatment (396).

We exclude businesses whose trade is selling research or unlicensed peptides, whatever they call themselves. See Are peptides legal in the UK?

• The quality of a provider’s care, or whether a treatment is right for you.
• The consultation you receive, or the individual prescriber (except the GMC check above, where a doctor’s number is published).
• Prices and waiting times. We don’t show prices yet.
• Google reviews, which are Google’s.

Registers change, and a provider can lose or gain a registration between our checks. Each record shows when we last matched it, and links to the live register entry. Before you start treatment, check that entry yourself; it takes a minute.