How we rank clinics

The formula

Each clinic’s score has four parts: a base score built from its Google rating and review volume, a bonus for accreditations, a bonus for years in operation, and a bonus for verified transparency on a second independent review platform. The four are added together and rounded to two decimal places.

1. Base score: rating × review volume

The base score is a clinic’s Google rating (out of 5) multiplied by 10, multiplied again by a “volume weight” between 0 and 1:

base = rating × 10 × volume weight
volume weight = the smaller of 1, or log₁₀(reviews + 1) ÷ 4

The volume weight exists so a clinic with a single 5-star review can’t outrank one with thousands of reviews at 4.8 stars. A rating only counts at full strength once a clinic has accumulated a substantial number of reviews: mathematically, exactly 9,999 or more Google reviews. Below that, the weight scales down on a logarithmic curve, so early reviews matter much more than later ones: going from 10 reviews to 100 moves the weight far more than going from 5,000 to 6,000.

A clinic with no public Google rating is not ranked at all. It is excluded from every ranking it would otherwise qualify for, rather than scored as if it had zero stars: a missing rating isn’t the same as a bad one, and every ranking page states that its ratings come from Google, so an unrated clinic has no reliable base score to be measured against the rest.

2. Accreditation bonus

A clinic earns +6 points for holding JCI (Joint Commission International) accreditation, and +2 points for each ISO certification it holds (for example ISO 9001 or ISO 14001). These add up across every accreditation the clinic discloses, but the combined accreditation bonus is capped at +10 points: a clinic with JCI plus three ISO marks still receives +10, not +12.

Source: Joint Commission International

3. Longevity bonus

A clinic earns +0.25 points for every year it has been in operation, calculated from its founding year, capped at +5 points, reached at 20 years and never exceeded, however much older the clinic is.

4. Second independent platform bonus (Trustpilot)

When a clinic has a public Trustpilot page, we link to it directly next to its Google rating, and, once we’ve captured one, show its own Trustpilot rating and review count alongside the Google figure as a second, separately labelled number, never averaged, blended, or combined with the Google rating into one score.

What the formula rewards is not what that Trustpilot score is; it’s whether a clinic has verifiably put a second independent platform in front of readers at all. A clinic earns a flat +2 points once we hold both a Trustpilot URL for it and an actual captured Trustpilot rating snapshot. A clinic that merely lists a Trustpilot URL, with no rating snapshot recorded against it yet, earns nothing from this bonus: a pasted link alone doesn’t count.

We deliberately don’t score the Trustpilot rating’s value the way we score the Google rating above. Not every clinic has a Trustpilot profile, and the ones that do are typically the ones running active review-collection campaigns there, and scoring the number itself would reward money spent on marketing rather than clinic quality, and would make scores incomparable between a clinic that happens to have a Trustpilot presence and one that simply never set one up. The fixed, score-independent +2 rewards the transparency of having a second, independently verifiable source on record, nothing more.

Source: Trustpilot Trust Centre

Two details about this bonus, both stated because they change what it means. It is measured at the level the platform operates on: not one of the hospital branches ranked here holds a Trustpilot profile of its own; only the chains do, so a branch earns the bonus from its group’s profile, which is a fact about the chain rather than about that building. And a profile must carry at least 30 reviews to count, because a page holding a handful of reviews is a second web address rather than a second source. The bonus is flat either way: it never reads the second platform’s score, so a facility rated lower there earns exactly what a higher-rated one earns. It rewards being checkable somewhere else, not being praised there.

Final score

The base score, accreditation bonus, longevity bonus and second-source bonus are added together and rounded to two decimal places. Because the base score cannot exceed 50 (a 5.0 rating at full volume weight), the accreditation bonus cannot exceed 10, the longevity bonus cannot exceed 5, and the second-source bonus cannot exceed 2, the highest score the formula can ever produce is 67.

A worked example

Take a clinic with a 4.8-star average Google rating from 2,100 reviews, a JCI accreditation, 17 years in operation, and a Trustpilot page we’ve captured a rating snapshot for:

1. Base score: 4.8 × 10 × 0.83 = 39.87 — 2,100 reviews give a volume weight of 0.83, not the full 1.0: the weight only reaches its maximum at 9,999 reviews, so this clinic’s rating counts at 83% of its face value.
2. Accreditation bonus: +6.00 — JCI alone; there are no ISO marks to add.
3. Longevity bonus: 17 × 0.25 = +4.25 — under the +5 cap, so the full amount applies.
4. Second-source bonus: +2.00 — a Trustpilot URL and a captured Trustpilot rating snapshot are both on file; the clinic’s actual Trustpilot star rating plays no part in this figure.
5. Final score: 39.87 + 6.00 + 4.25 + 2.00 = 52.12

When two clinics score the same

Scores are rounded to two decimal places, so two clinics can genuinely tie. When they do, the one with more Google reviews is placed higher: the same score resting on more reviews is the better-evidenced one, and it is a figure you can already see on the card. If the review counts are identical too, the order falls back to alphabetical by the clinic’s URL name: a deterministic backstop with no editorial meaning, there only so that running the same calculation over the same data always produces the same list.

Which parts of the formula apply to whom?

Every list on this site is scored by this one formula, but three kinds of entry are never ranked together: dedicated clinics, general hospitals, and individual surgeons. A hospital’s Google rating averages every department it runs, so it is never placed in a clinic’s list; a surgeon is a person, not a business, so two of the four parts above cannot apply at all.

Concretely: the accreditation bonus scores JCI and ISO, which are awarded to facilities; an individual surgeon cannot hold either, so it is structurally zero for every surgeon. The longevity bonus reads a business’s founding year, which is not a surgeon’s years in practice, and we do not substitute one for the other. A surgeon’s reachable maximum is therefore about 50 of the 67 available to a facility. Scores are only ever comparable within one list, never across lists of different kinds.

Where the data comes from

The figures below describe our sourcing policy: the standard every clinic’s data is meant to meet. As our clinic catalogue is still early-stage, not every published figure has been pulled through the automated pipeline described here yet; some are entered by us from the same public sources by hand while that pipeline is built out. No clinic can submit, edit, or dispute its own figures either way.

Google rating & review count

Our policy is to source these from each clinic’s public Google Business Profile via Google’s official Places API.

Accreditations

Our policy is to check these against public accreditation registries, such as JCI’s public list of accredited organisations and the relevant ISO certification body, alongside the clinic’s own public disclosures.

Years in operation

Our policy is to take this from the clinic’s public business registration or its own published founding date.

Trustpilot

When a clinic has a public Trustpilot page, our policy is to link to it directly next to its Google rating and, once captured, display its own rating and review count as a second, separately labelled figure. The rating’s value is never scraped into a blended score; see “4. Second independent platform bonus” above for the fixed, score-independent way its presence contributes.

How often it updates

Our policy is to refresh each clinic’s Google rating and recompute its score on a weekly cycle. Recomputation is mechanical: the same formula runs against every clinic, so no position is manually adjusted after the numbers are in. As we’re still building out clinic coverage, this refresh currently runs on our own schedule rather than a fully automated one; we’re moving toward full automation as our clinic coverage grows.