Editorial and Medical Review Policy

Anyone can publish a page about kidney transplantation. What separates one that helps from one that harms is not writing quality — it is whether the claims on it are true, whether somebody qualified checked them, and whether they are still true today.

Those three questions have answers on this platform, and this page is where they are written down so you can hold us to them.

The reason it matters more here than on most sites is the decision our readers are making. Somebody comparing two restaurants and getting it wrong has a bad evening. Somebody reading that a transplant is available to them abroad, when their country's rules say it is not, may spend savings they cannot replace and time they do not have. The cost of a careless sentence on this subject is measured in a currency we cannot give back.

So the standard we work to is not "accurate enough to be defensible". It is: every clinical claim traceable to a source you can open, every page dated, every uncertainty stated as uncertainty, and every mistake corrected in the open.

We do not always get it right. What we can promise is that when we do not, you will be able to tell, because the source is linked and the date is on the page.

Our evidence standards start with a short list: clinical content is written from four kinds of source, and from nothing else.

Clinical practice guidelines published by professional bodies — transplantation societies, specialty colleges, and the guideline programmes of national health systems. These are where criteria, thresholds and standard pathways come from, and they are the reason our pages can say what the usual eligibility criteria are without inventing them.

Registry and observatory data — the international and national registries that collect what actually happened to transplant recipients, and the Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation for activity by country. Registries are the only honest source for anything resembling an outcome figure.

National health authority material — ministries of health, regulators, and the bodies that run organ allocation. These are the only reliable source for what a country permits, and legal positions from anywhere else are secondhand.

Published tariffs and official price information, where such a thing exists. Where it does not, we say so and leave the cell empty.

What we deliberately do not use as a source: hospital marketing pages, agency websites, press releases, and anything whose purpose is to sell the treatment it describes. Those may be accurate; they are not evidence, and their incentives point the wrong way.

When a source has an authority ranking — a national guideline outranks a single study, a registry outranks an estimate — our system records that ranking, so a page built on weaker evidence can be identified rather than looking identical to one built on stronger.

Medical review here is not a read-through for tone. It is a claim-by-claim check with a specific question at each one: what is the source for this, and does the source say it.

The reviewer looks for four failures in particular, because they are the four that do damage.

Claims that have drifted from their source. A guideline says a criterion is usually applied; a draft says it is always applied. The words moved a little and the meaning moved a lot, and a reader now believes something is settled when it is not.

Figures without provenance. Any number about survival, success rates, waiting times or volumes has to come from a registry or an authority with a link. A figure that cannot be attributed is deleted rather than softened with "approximately".

Sentences a reader could take as advice about themselves. On this subject that is the commonest and most dangerous failure, because it is invisible to the person writing. "Patients with this condition are candidates" becomes, to somebody reading at two in the morning, "I am a candidate".

And overstated availability. Whether a treatment is genuinely reachable for an international patient is a legal and structural question, and the temptation to blur "possible in principle" into "possible for you" is exactly what this industry is criticised for.

Where a page cannot be supported, it does not get published with a caveat. It gets sent back.

A page that has been through this carries the reviewer and the review date. A page that has not is not published as though it had — and where our own drafts are waiting for that review, they stay drafts.

Medical information decays. Guidelines are revised, techniques change, legal positions shift, and prices move. A page with no date is asking you to assume it is current, which is the one thing you cannot verify from the outside.

So review dates are published on every page, showing when it was last checked, and our own system treats freshness as a first-class measure rather than an afterthought — a page that has gone too long without a review is flagged internally before a reader has to notice.

Prices are handled more strictly than anything else, because a stale price is actively misleading. Every published figure carries the source that confirmed it and the date it was confirmed. When it can no longer be re-verified, the figure is withdrawn and the cell is left empty. An empty cell tells you honestly that we do not know; a two-year-old number tells you something false with total confidence.

Legal positions get the same treatment. What a country permits regarding living donation, non-resident registration or donor relationships is described as at a date, from a named authority. Where a rule has changed and we have not yet confirmed the new position, we say that rather than leaving the old one standing.

We would rather a page said less and was current than said more and was wrong. That is a genuine trade-off — a fuller page performs better, and there is a real commercial pull toward leaving figures up. We resolve it the same way each time.

We get things wrong. Our corrections policy is about what happens next, which is the part that actually matters.

If you find an error — a factual mistake, an outdated guideline, a legal position that has changed, a price that is no longer real, a translation that reads wrongly — write and tell us. You do not need to prove it, and you do not need to be a clinician. A reader saying "this does not match what my hospital told me" is a genuinely useful signal, and several of our corrections have started exactly there.

What we do with it: we check the claim against its source, and against a better source if one exists. If we were wrong, we correct the page and update its review date. If the error was material — something that could have changed a reader's decision — we say on the page that it was corrected, rather than editing quietly and hoping nobody noticed.

If we were right, we will tell you why, with the source. That is not a brush-off; it is often the more useful answer, because it usually means a genuine difference between what a guideline says in general and what a particular hospital does in practice, and knowing which you are looking at is worth something.

We do not remove accurate content because somebody dislikes it. That includes hospitals. If a page says a pathway is not available in a country, and that is what the country's rules say, it stays — and if we are shown that the rules have changed, we will happily update it and thank whoever told us.

This platform publishes in more than one language, and a translated medical page carries a risk that a translated marketing page does not: a threshold, a criterion or a warning that shifts meaning in translation is a clinical error, not a stylistic one.

So translated pages are written rather than machine-translated. A page in another language is authored to the same standard, against the same sources, and reviewed in that language. Consent wording in particular is never machine-translated: an approximate translation of a consent statement is not consent, and treating it as one would be indefensible.

On independence: our editorial decisions are not for sale. We do not accept payment for coverage, we do not sell placement in a listing, and no hospital has approval over what we publish about it. Where a hospital tells us something about itself, we say that is where it came from. Where we have a commercial relationship with a hospital, our partner disclosure page says so plainly, because a reader is entitled to know whether the party recommending a centre is paid by it.

The test we apply to ourselves is simple, and it is the one we would want applied: would this sentence still be here if it cost us a case? Several pages on this site exist precisely because the answer was yes — pages whose entire content is that a pathway a reader was hoping for is not lawfully open to them.