Corrections Policy

Zavis publishes tens of thousands of pages about real healthcare facilities and real licensed practitioners, built from public government registers. At that scale, some records will be wrong. A clinic moves and the register lags. A practitioner changes employer between two snapshots. A telephone number is retired. An article misreads a regulator circular. None of that is acceptable to leave standing, and none of it is fixed by a policy that only says we care about accuracy.

This page sets out the mechanics: who to write to, what we need from you, how long each class of correction takes, how we decide what counts as evidence, what we record when we change something, and what you can do if you disagree with our answer.

Email [email protected] with the URL of the page in question, the specific claim or data point you believe is incorrect, and any supporting evidence (a primary source, a regulator filing, a screenshot of an official register). We acknowledge every correction request within two business days.

Four things make a report fast to act on: the exact URL rather than a page title, the single field or sentence at issue, the value you believe is correct, and where that value comes from. A link to the facility record in the DHA, DOH or MOHAP register settles most listing questions on the spot. For an article, the underlying document, dataset or filing does the same job.

You do not need to prove who you are to file a correction, and you do not need to work at the facility concerned. Patients, clinic staff, regulators and competitors all file corrections. What decides the outcome is the evidence attached to the report. Requests to erase personal data are the one exception, and they are covered further down this page.

Directory data has a clear order of authority. For a facility’s legal name, licence number, licence type, category and emirate, the issuing regulator wins. If the DHA, DOH or MOHAP register says one thing and a clinic tells us another, we hold the register value and ask the clinic to update the register. We will note the discrepancy on our side while it is resolved.

For operational fields the regulator does not maintain — opening hours, current telephone number, website, services offered, languages spoken, whether a branch has closed — the facility itself is the better source, and evidence from the operator on official letterhead, from a verified clinic email domain, or through the provider portal is enough to act on.

For an Intelligence article, we go back to the primary document: the circular, the dataset, the filing, the transcript, the published study. A secondary report of the same fact does not override the original. If a correction rests on something we cannot see, we will tell you what we would need in order to act, and we keep the request open rather than closing it as unresolved.

A directory listing is a live record. Correcting it replaces the wrong value with the right one, and the page then shows the corrected value with no visible history. The change itself is still recorded internally, as described below.

An article is a dated document. We do not quietly rewrite published work. When an article is corrected, the corrected text carries an inline note saying what changed and when, the article’s dateModified moves forward, and a correction that materially changes the story is added to the public log at the foot of this page. The original dateline stays where it is. A reader arriving a year later should be able to see both what we published and what we got wrong.

If you run the facility and want standing control of its page instead of a one-off fix, claim the listing. Claiming is free. You submit the facility’s DHA, DOH or MOHAP licence number together with proof that you are authorised to act for it, such as a business card, official letterhead or a message from the clinic email domain. Our team checks the licence number against the regulator register, and most claims are reviewed within two to three business days. Start at /claim.

Once a claim is approved, the operator can maintain hours, insurance, services and photographs directly through the provider portal without emailing us each time. Claiming a listing buys no editorial advantage. Hub-page ordering is driven by public signals applied uniformly to every facility on the page, and a claim does not move it. A claim also gives the operator no control over Intelligence coverage that mentions them.

Every manual edit made to a listing through our admin console is written to an append-only change log. Each entry records the record that changed, the specific field, the previous value, the new value, who made the change, the reason given, and the timestamp. Entries are never deleted. Edits made by a clinic through the provider portal are written to a second audit log that additionally records the portal user who made them.

That trail is what makes the commitments at the foot of this page checkable. If a facility asks us six months from now who changed its category and on what grounds, the answer exists.

An accepted correction is written to the database immediately. Directory pages are statically rendered and revalidate every six hours, so the corrected page is normally live the same day. Sitemaps regenerate hourly. When a search engine re-crawls the corrected URL, and how quickly its cached snippet catches up, is outside our control.

One consequence worth naming: a corrected listing that is still sparse may remain marked noindex and stay out of the sitemap. That is the thin-content gate described on our data sources page, and it is not a penalty. Completing the listing through the provider portal is what lifts it.

Directory listings mirror a public government register, so we cannot make a currently licensed facility disappear from a directory of currently licensed facilities. What we can do covers almost every real request behind that ask. We can mark a facility as permanently closed. We can correct any field that is wrong. We can suppress a direct telephone number or email address where publishing it causes a genuine problem. Where a facility has left the register entirely, it is flagged on the next refresh and drops out of the indexable sitemap.

Requests of this kind go to [email protected] and follow the same response times as any other listing correction. Removal of a natural person’s data is a different legal question and is handled below.