Corrections and takedowns

MedicWatch is a faithful record of publicly published decisions of UK healthcare regulators. We do not editorialise, characterise, or score practitioners. Pages are not removed simply because the practitioner prefers them not to exist; they may be removed where there is a clear factual error, a privacy concern that outweighs the public interest, a legal requirement, or a duplicate record.

When we will correct a page

• The page contains a factual inaccuracy that does not match the source determination.
• The page is out of date — for example, a sanction has been lifted on review by the regulator and we have not yet captured the change.
• The plain-English summary fails our faithfulness rules (e.g. uses characterising language).

When we will remove a page

• The source determination has been quashed or set aside on appeal, and there is no remaining public-interest justification for the page to exist.
• The page is a duplicate of another page on this site (we will keep the canonical one).
• A privacy concern is raised which, in our editorial judgement, outweighs the public interest in the record. This is rare; regulator decisions are public records and the public-interest threshold is high.
• A court has ordered removal.

When we will not remove a page

• The practitioner prefers it not to exist. Regulator decisions are published precisely so that they can be found by patients and the public; preference alone is not a basis for removal.
• The original source has been removed from the regulator’s site (e.g. NMC’s rolling 3-month window, GMC’s 10-year erasure rule). MedicWatch retains these records under the journalism exemption.
• The practitioner has subsequently been restored to the register after a sanction was lifted. The original sanction remains a matter of public record; we will note the restoration alongside it, not in place of it.

How requests are handled

Each request is logged and reviewed by the editorial team against the source determination. Most requests are reviewed within five working days. If you provide an email address we will reply to you with the decision. If we approve a removal, the page is immediately unpublished and the slug is reserved (so it does not get re-created on a future re-ingest).