Editorial Policy

1. Editorial Mission

medical-centers.org/ exists to make finding the right hospital, clinic, or medical center practical for non-experts across four countries. The audience is broad: a parent looking for the nearest paediatric ED, a patient researching a specialty cancer center, a traveller identifying an accredited hospital in an unfamiliar city, a family member coordinating cross-border care for a relative, a journalist filing a story, a researcher looking up a teaching hospital. Every page is written so a non-expert reader can find the right facility, understand its services, see where it is on a map, and reach the right desk on the first try.

2. The Manual-Verification Standard

Every facility, every URL, every phone number, every address, and every Google Maps location on medical-centers.org/ is verified by a human editor against the facility's own published page. We do not auto-scrape. We do not pull from third-party databases. We do not generate content from a stale snapshot of the web. Every contact is human-verified before publication and re-verified on a quarterly cycle.

3. Screenshot Capture Practice

Screenshots are stored internally for editorial reference. We do not republish facility website screenshots on the site (to avoid copyright complications and to encourage readers to visit the facility’s own page). Where a walkthrough refers to a specific button label, form field, or navigation path, that reference reflects the screenshot we captured at verification time.

4. Independence

We are not affiliated with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the Joint Commission, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Hospital Association (AHA), the National Health Service (NHS) in any of its forms, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Healthcare Inspectorate Wales, RQIA Northern Ireland, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the General Medical Council (GMC), Health Canada, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), Accreditation Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), the Australian Department of Health and Aged Care, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (ACSQHC), the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), or any specific medical center, hospital, health system, NHS trust, provincial health authority, state local-health-district, hospital network, insurer, or pharmaceutical company.

Our publication is privately operated and editorially independent. Decisions about what to cover, how to describe services, and what we link to are made by editorial staff, not by advertisers, hospitals, or healthcare networks.

5. Six-Tier Source Hierarchy

Every page is built using a tested source hierarchy. Higher-tier sources govern when sources conflict.

6. Eight-Step Verification Process

1. Identify the right source. Facility’s own page on the facility’s official domain, cross-checked against national references (Hospital Compare, CQC, Accreditation Canada, AIHW MyHospitals).
2. Verify URL is live. A human editor clicks every link before publication.
3. Capture screenshots manually. Homepage, services, ED (where applicable), and visitor information — dated and stored.
4. Dial-test the main switchboard. Quarterly cycle.
5. Verify addresses against country-specific postal lookup. USPS (US), Royal Mail Postcode Finder (UK), Canada Post (Canada), Australia Post (Australia).
6. Pin Google Maps location to the verified street address. Not to a generic city centre.
7. Cross-reference accreditation and quality data. Joint Commission / CQC / Accreditation Canada / ACSQHC.
8. Editor sign-off. A second editor reviews end-to-end, including a fresh check on the not-medical-advice notice and the country-specific emergency routing block.

7. We Do Not Rank Clinical Quality

Clinical quality cannot responsibly be ranked from publicly-available data alone. Patient outcomes vary by case-mix, acuity, social determinants, and many factors that public-quality datasets adjust for imperfectly. Public quality data — Hospital Compare star ratings, CQC ratings, Provincial public hospital data, AIHW MyHospitals — are produced by the relevant public authorities. We link readers to those public sources and we do not republish, score, rank, or interpret them. We do not create our own “best hospitals” lists.

8. Handling Sensitive Topics

9. Corrections

• Acknowledge within 1 business day. Every correction email gets a human acknowledgement.
• Verify within 7 business days. We re-check against the facility’s own page, re-capture the screenshot, and respond.
• Expedited path for actively-broken contacts. Phone numbers that don’t work and addresses that postal lookup rejects get a 48-hour target.
• Material corrections are noted. Where a substantive fact has changed (facility merger, network rebrand, ED status change, address move), the page is updated and the next review timestamp is reset.
• We do not retroactively edit history. If a page is materially wrong, we fix the current version and note the correction at the bottom for at least 30 days.

10. Conflicts of Interest

Editorial staff do not hold financial interests in: any specific medical center, hospital, health system, NHS trust, provincial health authority, hospital network, healthcare insurer, pharmaceutical company, medical device manufacturer, healthcare technology vendor, telehealth platform, or any company whose products or services we describe directly. Editorial staff are not currently practising clinicians employed at a facility we cover. Editorial staff with personal care relationships at a covered facility are recused from editing that facility’s page.

11. No Pharmaceutical or Device-Company Sponsorship

We do not accept editorial sponsorship, “sponsored content,” or “advertorial” arrangements from pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, or any operation marketing prescription products or regulated medical devices. We do not accept advertising from operations promoting unregulated medical claims, miracle-cure marketing, or unauthorised pharmaceutical sales. The full position is on the Disclaimer.

12. AI & Automation Policy

We use software tools for spell-check, grammar review, and routine drafting assistance — like most modern publications. However, no editorial fact, contact detail, URL, address, phone number, Google Maps location, accreditation status, or service description on medical-centers.org/ is published from AI without human verification against the originating source, including the manual screenshot capture step. Every page passes through human editorial review, including the eight-step verification process described above. We do not auto-generate or auto-publish facility pages.

13. Commercial Position

The site is funded by display advertising. The official facility contact always comes first on every page, before any commercial reference. We do not take advertising from:

• Operations marketing as if they were a hospital, healthcare regulator, or accrediting body
• Paid-placement directories that misrepresent themselves as official
• FCRA-prohibited “background check” products dressed as physician-research tools
• Operations promoting unregulated medical claims, miracle-cure marketing, or unauthorised pharmaceutical sales
• Telehealth or cross-border-care operations that misrepresent their licensure status
• Any operation that has been subject to FTC, MHRA, Health Canada, or TGA enforcement action

14. Editorial Staff & Bylines

medical-centers.org/ operates under a unified editorial byline ("medical-centers.org/ Editorial") because facility guides are produced and reviewed by multiple editors. For specific source attribution on any factual statement, see the page's footnotes or contact us.