Editorial Policy & Standards

At The Local Dentist, our mission is to empower UK dental patients with transparent, accurate, and actionable information to help them make informed choices about dental care. This document outlines our strict editorial standards, desk assessment guidelines, regulatory verification procedures, and monetisation firewall.

1. Core Editorial Principles

Our work is guided by five non-negotiable principles:

Zero Fabrication: We never invent, estimate, or fabricate practice ratings, patient reviews, fees, queue times, or clinical credentials. Where a figure is unknown or missing from official registers, we publish "Not yet published" or "Not yet rated".
Primary Source Provenance: Every number, regulatory status, or pricing range published on The Local Dentist carries a primary source link and a capture date (e.g. CQC care directory, NHS ODS database, NHSBSA Open Data Portal, or official practice price lists).
Commercial Firewall: Financial arrangements (such as labelled featured listings or referral partnerships) are completely firewalled from editorial ratings and rankings. Payment can buy labelled visibility, but can never buy, raise, or protect a score.
Clear Clinical Boundaries: We are a directory and comparison platform — not a dental practice. We do not provide clinical advice, and we enforce strict regulatory language around dental treatments (e.g., confirming that tooth whitening is a course of dentistry restricted to GDC-registered clinicians).
Continuous Verification: We regularly audit our database against official registers and publish dated updates, maintaining a public Corrections Log.

2. Desk Assessment & Verification Standards

When evaluating UK dental practices, our editorial team conducts a structured "desk assessment" based on public register facts and verified practice documentation.

Desk assessment steps include:

Regulator Match: Verifying the location on the Care Quality Commission (CQC) register in England, Healthcare Inspectorate Wales (HIW), Care Inspectorate / Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS), or Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority (RQIA) in Northern Ireland.
GDC Registrant Check: Cross-referencing named principal clinicians against the General Dental Council (GDC) register.
NHS Contract Status: Confirming NHS activity reporting via NHSBSA open datasets and linking to live NHS.uk directory entries.
Pricing Transparency Audit: Reviewing published fee lists to confirm whether check-up, hygienist, and common restorative prices are accessible to patients before booking.

3. NHS vs Private Price Guidelines

Navigating UK dental fees can be confusing. Our editorial content strictly distinguishes between NHS fixed national charges and private practice fees:

NHS Dentistry: Fixed nationally by health departments (England Band 1 £27.90, Band 2 £76.60, Band 3 £332.10; Scotland maximum charge cap £384). An NHS course of treatment attracts one band fee — never per-item charges — and NHS charges do not vary between practices within the same nation.

Private Dentistry: Set by individual practices based on clinician experience, location, materials, and appointment length. We publish indicative benchmark ranges per city tier (major city, large city, town) to help patients evaluate value, but always advise confirming a written treatment plan prior to care.

4. Patient Experience & Review Integrity

Patient reviews are critical to trust, but false ratings are a major risk online. To protect patients:

We only display review averages from verified, attributed third-party platforms (such as NHS.uk patient ratings or Google Reviews) with stated sample sizes.
We apply Bayesian shrinkage to review scores so small sample sizes (e.g. two 5-star reviews) cannot artificially outrank established practices with hundreds of reviews.
We never write, buy, or permit unverified user-submitted reviews. Unrated practices are clearly marked as "Not yet rated".

5. Monetisation Integrity & Disclosure

The Local Dentist is funded through optional paid listing tiers, featured directory placements, and referral partnerships. To maintain 100% independence:

All paid placements carry a clear, visible label (e.g. "Featured Practice" or "Ad – Affiliate").
Outbound commercial links carry rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" attributes, enforced automatically by build-time quality gates.
When a free or official option (such as NHS emergency dental care via 111) is the best recommendation for a query, we highlight it regardless of commercial relationships.

6. Corrections, Complaints, and Right of Reply

Accuracy is our highest priority. If a practice owner, clinician, or reader identifies an error:

Email info@thelocaldentist.co.uk with details and supporting evidence (such as CQC location ID or official register links). We investigate all requests within five working days. Verified factual corrections are updated in our database, and material editorial corrections are publicly logged on our Corrections Log page.

7. What triggers a correction?

A correction is triggered when a published fact is wrong against its primary source: a CQC location ID that does not match the register, an NHS band fee that no longer matches NHSBSA, a GDC number that belongs to someone else, or a private “from” price the practice has superseded in writing. A correction is not triggered because a practice dislikes its unclaimed status, missing review score, or labelled paid placement.

Who decides: the publisher, Kaiser Khan, on the evidence supplied. Practices cannot pay to suppress a register fact. If we cannot verify the claim against a public source, we do not change the page — we may add “practice told us X on [date]” as attributed text, which is not the same as replacing the register.

8. What we will not publish

We will not invent review scores, opening hours, NHS new-patient status, or private fees. We will not mark a practice as “not taking NHS patients” merely because our file is blank — absence of data is not evidence of absence. We will not imply we have treated patients at a practice we have only desk-assessed. We will not put a year in a URL so that every January the slug goes stale.

We will not mark up supplier or scraped star ratings as aggregateRating. Visible, dated, method-cited scores may appear as text. First-party reviews, when we have them with a stated count of five or more, are the only ratings that may be marked up.

9. How money cannot buy a better page

Featured listings, referral partnerships and partner website offers are commercial products. They buy labelled visibility and, where relevant, an enquiry route. They do not buy a higher score, a better match position, or removal of a register problem. The free route is named when it wins: NHS 111 for urgent care, the GDC register for a registration check, nhs.uk for who is taking new NHS patients.

If you are a practice owner, the honest path is to claim the listing and supply prices, hours and a GDC principal we can verify. Paying does not skip verification.

10. Desk assessment, step by step

Match the legal name and address to the relevant practice register.
Record the CQC location ID in England, or note the devolved regulator when the practice is not in England.
Where named, check the principal clinician on the GDC register.
Attach NHSBSA activity only on a high-confidence name and postcode match — activity is not “accepting new patients”.
Publish private fees only when the practice (or its own site) has stated them. Otherwise the profile says prices are not yet published.
Stamp register-derived fields with the snapshot or extract date. Sitemap lastmod uses the same date as the visible stamp.

That process is why a thin marketing paragraph cannot replace a listing. If a competitor page could be rewritten from ours without the register IDs and dated charges, it is not a reason to cite us — and we will not publish that kind of page ourselves.