Editorial policy

Who publishes this site

Dentist-London.com is an independent directory of every CQC-registered dental practice in Greater London. We are not a dental practice and we do not provide clinical or medical services. Guides and data pages are researched, written and reviewed by the Dentist-London.com editorial team rather than credited to an individual, because the work is a method applied consistently rather than one person's opinion. Where a page states a fact, it names where the fact came from.

Nothing on this site is medical advice. For treatment decisions, see a GDC-registered dentist. In a dental emergency, call NHS 111.

Where the information comes from

• Which practices exist. The Care Quality Commission register. Every one of the 2,131 practices we list is CQC-registered. The CQC checks that dental practices meet regulations; it does not currently give dental practices ratings, so we never publish one.
• Treatments and prices. Each practice's own website, read by our crawler. A treatment is only listed for a practice when that practice's own site names it, so nothing is guessed from a directory category.
• NHS availability. NHS England data on whether a practice was accepting new NHS patients. Practices self-report this and many have not updated it recently, so we always show the month it was last reported rather than implying it is live.
• Ratings and reviews. Google, attributed to Google, and never rewritten.
• NHS charges and entitlements. The NHS and the NHS Business Services Authority. We do not restate these from memory or from other directories.

More detail on collection and checking is on about our data.

How we work out prices

Prices are published "from" prices taken from practices' own fee pages, never estimates. For any treatment we take each practice's lowest published price, then the median across practices, so a single expensive clinic cannot move the figure. Full-arch implant work is excluded from single-implant figures because it runs to five figures and would make the median meaningless.

The same method produces every price on the site, so the price list, the treatment pages and the London Dental Cost Index cannot disagree with each other. A borough is only priced where at least 5 practices publish a figure, and the practice count is shown so you can see how firm each number is.

These are advertised starting prices, not quotes. What you pay depends on the work you need.

How often we check

Practice details and prices are re-read from source on a rolling basis, and NHS availability is refreshed weekly. Guides carry the date they were first published and the date they were last reviewed, both at the foot of the page. Where a guide quotes a figure that changes on a fixed date, such as NHS band charges each April, it is reviewed when the figure changes.

How we make money, and what it does not buy

Being straight about this matters more than claiming to be neutral. We sell paid placement, and here is exactly what it changes.

• Every practice is listed, free, whether it pays or not. All 2,131 CQC-registered practices in London are here. Nobody buys their way in, and nobody can pay to have a competitor removed or hidden.
• Claiming a listing is free and always will be. A practice can correct its details, add treatments and photos and get a verified badge without paying anything.
• Featured placement is paid, and always labelled. A Featured practice appears at the top of its borough page and higher in treatment and "near me" results, and carries a "Featured" label wherever it does. If it is not labelled, it is not paid.

What paying never changes is the facts. A practice's published prices, its CQC registration, its Google rating and its NHS status are exactly the same whether it pays us or not. We do not hide a price because a practice would rather we did, we do not remove a rating anyone dislikes, and paying does not alter one word of another practice's entry. Position can be bought here. Information cannot.

What we will not do

• No invented data. If we do not hold a price, a rating or an NHS status, the page says so rather than filling the gap.
• No unlabelled advertising. Paid placement is marked as such, every time.
• No rewritten reviews, and no ratings of our own.
• No selling your data, and no tracking you across other sites.
• No CQC ratings. The CQC does not rate dental practices, so any site showing you one is inventing it.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. That applies to practice details, a price, an NHS status, or anything in a guide.

Use the contact page, and say which page the problem is on. We check the claim against the original source rather than simply accepting an edit, because the whole point of the directory is that entries are verifiable. Corrections to practice details are usually applied within a few working days, and every change is logged against the practice so we can see what changed and when.

If you run a practice and the entry is wrong, the fastest route is the claim your listing page.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with something we have published and a correction has not resolved it, the complaints page sets out what to do. Complaints about the care you received belong with the practice or with the CQC rather than with us, and the complaints page explains that route too.