How we measure
Version 1.0.0, updated 29 August 2026. Public name of the score: Structural Verification Index. Every number on this site can be recomputed from the published data and the rules on this page: the engine reads the same file this page is rendered from.
What we check — and what we do not
We check structural trust facts against official public registers: who the responsible physician is, what certification and licence the registers confirm, whether the facility and the legal entity can be traced, whether the clinic discloses its own identifiers, whether its advertising is honest, whether its language fronts agree, and whether patient documents are published.
We do not assess outcomes, skill or complications. A high score means the clinic is well verified, not that treatment there is right for you. This is not medical advice.
The unit
One record = one clinic in this country: brand + address + responsible physician. The named physician is the load-bearing field — every register check is by name. Procedure segment and city are facets, not units.
Inclusion policy
Four mechanical conditions. The first three decide whether a clinic is listed; the fourth whether it can be scored.
- Identifiable: a live public surface and a working in-country contact on the check date.
- Provides the service itself: not an aggregator, booking site, affiliate or tour packager.
- In scope: the intervention is performed by a physician — plastic or aesthetic surgery, hair transplant, physician-led injectables or device treatments, medical weight loss. Out: salons, barbers, nails/brows/lashes, spas, med-spas without a named physician.
- Names a responsible physician. Otherwise the record is published as verification unavailable: listed, not scored, no rank. Unknown is not fault — a missing name is a statement about coverage, not an accusation.
Country register map
The map for Barbados was compiled 29 August 2026, before any clinic research. A class marked as absent makes its axis not applicable; a register that cannot be scripted leaves its axis cells as 'could not verify', without penalty. We never simulate a register.
| Specialist board register | Barbados Association of Medical Practitioners (BAMP) — Members Directory: a public table of member doctors with Name, Speciality, Work Number, Business Name and Business Address. This is the professional association of Barbadian doctors, NOT the state specialist register (the Barbados Medical Council's own Specialist Register under the Medical Profession Act, 2011-1 is described in medical_licence below and is unusable — see notes). (open, machine-readable) REPLAYABLE RECIPE (no token, no cookie, no login, no captcha, one request): GET https://www.bamp.org.bb/members-directory/ with a browser User-Agent → a WordPress page containing exactly ONE <table>; every member is one <tr> of six <td> (Name, Email, Speciality, Work Number, Business Name, Business Address). There is NO pagination and NO server-side search — the whole directory is in that single response, so filtering is a local operation. A JSON alternative delivering the same markup is the WordPress REST route https://www.bamp.org.bb/wp-json/wp/v2/pages/?slug=members-directory (or .../wp/v2/pages/949) → content.rendered holds the same table. CAVEATS THAT MATTER: (a) FRESHNESS — the WP REST record reports modified=2022-11-25T10:08:47, so this is a 2022-vintage snapshot; a doctor's presence proves association membership as of that date, not current practice, and a doctor absent from it may simply be a non-member or a later arrival. Never treat absence as evidence of anything. (b) It is a MEMBERSHIP list of a voluntary professional society, not a statutory register: the Speciality string is self-declared to BAMP, spelling is inconsistent ('Pathalogy', 'Familly Medicine', 'Practioneer', 'Cardiothoracic Surgeon' vs 'Cardiothoracic Surgery') and some rows carry registrar/locum grades ('Junior Doctor', 'General Surgery -Locum', 'SHO- Internal Medicine', 'Family Medicine(Reg.1)'). Normalise case and collapse whitespace before matching, and match on surname rather than on the honorific-prefixed full name ('Dr. ', 'Dr ' both occur). (c) Email addresses are unusable (Cloudflare email-protection spans). WHAT WAS TRIED AND REJECTED AS THE STATE ROUTE: the Barbados Medical Council's own register at https://health.gov.bb/Councils/Medical-Council/Medical-Register does expose a practitioner TYPE field with exactly two values, 'General Practitioner' and 'Specialist' — but (i) it carries NO speciality at all, so even with real data it could never distinguish plastic surgery from any other specialty, and (ii) the dataset published there is demo/placeholder content, proven in medical_licence.testedExample below. The Medical Profession Act, 2011-1 does provide for a specialist register that records the speciality (Part II of the Seventh Schedule) and the Council runs an Assessment Committee for specialist registration, but no such speciality-bearing list is published online. Also checked and rejected: health.gov.bb/Healthcare-Locator (15 STATE facilities only — the polyclinics, QEH, Geriatric and Psychiatric Hospitals, outpatient clinics; no doctors, no private clinics), the Dental / Nursing / Pharmacy / Paramedical Councils on health.gov.bb (no register page of any kind), and the BAMP 'Hospitals & Medical Centres' page (4 entries only: QEH, Bayview Hospital, FMH Emergency Medical Centre, Sandy Crest Medical Centre). |
|---|---|
| Medical licence register | Barbados Medical Council — Medical Practitioners Register, published by the Ministry of Health and Wellness; the register of doctors licensed to practise medicine in Barbados under the Medical Profession Act, 2011-1 (public view: Reg. #, Name of Medical Practitioner, Status = General Practitioner | Specialist) (form-based, not scriptable) CLASSIFICATION — READ BEFORE CHANGING IT. Mechanically the gate is open: there is no captcha, no login and no session token on the search path, and a scripted GET returns rows. It is nevertheless classified 'form' and NOT 'open', because the brief's definition of open requires that 'the response CONTAINED the record', and it never does: the published dataset is placeholder/demo content (149 machine-generated names) rather than the Barbados Medical Council's real register. 'form' is the closest of the four permitted values — a search exists, but a scripted request never returns the row you are looking for. DO NOT UPGRADE THIS TO 'open' on the strength of a 200 response; re-run the probes in testedExample first and only reclassify when real Barbadian physicians (start with Judy Ward, Andrew Forde, Alfred Sparman) actually come back. The axis cells stay null, without penalty, and 'unlicensed' must never be inferred from a doctor's absence here. SCRIPTED-QUERY RECIPE (fully replayable, it simply yields the wrong data): (1) optional GET https://health.gov.bb/Councils/Medical-Council/Medical-Register with a browser UA — it sets an X-CSRF-TOKEN-JARVIS cookie and inlines site_xcsrf_token, but neither is required for the search. (2) GET https://health.gov.bb/api/medicalregister/searchpartial?name=<substring>&type=<Any|General%20Practitioner|Specialist>&view=<Cards|Table> → returns an HTML fragment, not JSON. view=Table gives a 4-column <table> (icon, Reg. #, Name of Medical Practitioner, Status) that parses cleanly with /<td>(\d+)<\/td>\s*<td>([^<]+)<\/td>\s*<td>([^<]+)<\/td>/; any unrecognised view value (view=Json was tried) silently falls back to the Cards layout. The name filter is a case-insensitive substring over the full name (name=Connell matches 'Maeve McConnell' and 'Noa McConnell'), so it is usable for surname lookups. type= filters exactly on the two literal strings 'General Practitioner' and 'Specialist' — there is NO speciality field anywhere in the register, so even with real data this source could not distinguish plastic surgery from any other specialty. There is no pagination: pg= and page= are ignored and the full set comes back in one response. WHAT ELSE WAS TRIED AND FAILED: /api/medicalregister, /api/medicalregister/search and /api/medicalregister/export all 404; https://health.gov.bb/sitemap.xml lists only 9 URLs and no practitioner pages; https://health.gov.bb/robots.txt 404s; the practitioner names in the Cards view are wrapped in href="#", i.e. there are no detail pages at all; the Internet Archive has NO snapshot of the register page (http://archive.org/wayback/available returned "archived_snapshots": {}), so no earlier, real version can be compared; the Medical Council's Publications page carries only two PDFs (Advertising Guidelines, Medical Registration CAP.371) and no register listing; the Medical Profession Act, 2011-1 PDF at health.gov.bb is a 3.1 MB image scan with no extractable text layer. THE ONE AUTHORITATIVE ROUTE THAT DOES EXIST is not scriptable: the Council issues a Certificate of Good Standing on request through https://eforms.gov.bb/f/mhwcertificateofgoodstanding (200, an application form, per-request and not a register), with the Council reachable at medical.council@health.gov.bb / (246) 536-3910. Language is English throughout; no diacritics issues. |
| Facility register | no public register of this class in this country |
| Company register | CAIPO — Corporate Affairs and Intellectual Property Office (Government of Barbados): the national companies and business-names registry, exposed through the office's public 'Search Our Database' facility (fields returned: company name, registration number, registration category, registration date) (open, machine-readable) REPLAYABLE RECIPE (no cookie, no session, no CSRF token, no captcha, no login — verified by sending the POST cold, with no prior GET): POST https://caipo.gov.bb/sso/site/searchDbApi, body multipart/form-data (curl -F), header 'X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest' (the page's own fetch sends it; the endpoint also answered without it), browser User-Agent. At least ONE filter group must be present or the UI refuses — the four groups are: name_search_con + name_search_param; number_search_con + number_search_param (+ number_search_param2 for Between); category_search_con + category_search_param; date_search_con + date_search_param (+ date_search_param2 for Between). Condition values are literal strings taken from the page's <select>s: name — Contains | Equals | Starts with | NOT Empty | Empty; number — Contains | Equals | Starts with | More than | Less than | Between | NOT Empty | Empty; date — Equals | More than (= After) | Less than (= Before) | Between | NOT Empty | Empty. Response is JSON: {"data":[{company_name, company_number, registration_category, registration_date}], "total":N, "truncated":bool}. Windows note: build the body with curl -F (or Node FormData); do not use --data-urlencode. CATEGORY VOCABULARY (exact option values, note the TRAILING SPACES which are part of the value): 'DOMESTIC REGISTER ', 'BUSINESS NAMES ' (two trailing spaces), 'EXTERNAL COMPANY REGISTER ', 'CHARITY REGISTER ', 'NON PROFIT REGISTER ', 'PHARMACIES REGISTER ', 'INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS COMPANY ', 'DOMESTIC SOCIETY (SRL) REGISTER ', 'TRADE UNION REGISTER ', 'FORMER ACT COMPANIES (NOT CONTINUED) ', plus the amalgamation/exempt-insurance/off-shore variants and a 'Demo Company - For test/demo only ' bucket. Aesthetic clinics appear either as an incorporated company on the DOMESTIC REGISTER or, for sole traders, as a registered trade name on BUSINESS NAMES — search both, and note that some rows carry the truncated category 'BUS'. PITFALLS: (a) company_number is NOT unique — the same number recurs across different registers and across renamed entities (21131 = Kiddies Kingdom on BUSINESS NAMES, and both Barbados Fertility Centre Inc. and Sims International Fertility Clinic Inc. on DOMESTIC REGISTER, the latter pair evidently the same file before and after a change of name), so cite name + number + category + date together, never the number alone. (b) The result carries NO status field — there is no active/struck-off/dissolved flag and no registered address, directors or filings, so this source can attest that a legal entity of that name exists and its registration date, but NOT that it is currently in good standing. Company detail pages and the Sbírka-listin-style document collection sit behind the CAIPO SSO at /sso/account/signin and were not used. (c) Names are stored upper-case with irregular internal spacing; match case-insensitively on a normalised, whitespace-collapsed string. (d) The office's own disclaimer on the search page reads: 'This database search facility is provided as a reference to help persons locate registered entities. The information displayed is sourced from the Business Barbados registry and may be subject to updates. For the most accurate and current information, please contact the Corporate Affairs and Intellectual Property Office directly.' (e) The companion autocomplete endpoint /sso/site/companyAutocomplete (POST, fields term + type=name) answered {"error":"Method Not Allowed"} to a scripted call and is not needed — searchDbApi alone is sufficient. registration_date is a real, citable Datum for a clinic operator's age and is safely earlier than any site data floor; it is the date the LEGAL ENTITY was registered, not the date the clinic opened. |
| Sanctions / discipline register | no public register of this class in this country |
| Foreign-patient register | no public register of this class in this country |
The nine axes
Every axis is a fact or a quote from a public source, scored 1–5 against a fixed rubric. There are no editorial axes. Each cell carries its sources, its source class (official register / secondary) and its check date.
Fame, review volume, domain age and social-media following are scored nowhere.
M1 · Specialist certification of the responsible physician — weight 26
Whether the physician named as responsible for this clinic is found in the country's specialist board register with a current specialisation matching the advertised segment (plastic surgery or dermatology, by segment).
| Value | Anchor |
|---|---|
| 5 | Found by name or number; specialty matches what is advertised; status current. |
| 4 | Found; specialty adjacent to what is advertised (noted on the profile). |
| 3 | Found in the register; the register does not disclose specialty. |
| 2 | Only a secondary source (association, aggregator) supports the certification. |
| 1 | Certification is claimed and found in no source. |
M2 · Identifiability of the responsible physician — weight 16
Whether a patient can name the specific physician and their role before making contact, and whether that physician is tied to this location.
| Value | Anchor |
|---|---|
| 5 | Physician(s) named with role and tied to this address. |
| 4 | Named; role unclear. |
| 3 | A name appears in only one place on the site. |
| 2 | Surname or initials without a full name. |
| 1 | 'Our team' only — this is the gate state 'verification unavailable'. |
M3 · Basic medical licence — weight 8
Whether the responsible physician's registration is found in the country's medical licence register.
Register class: Medical licence register — Barbados Medical Council — Medical Practitioners Register, published by the Ministry of Health and Wellness; the register of doctors licensed to practise medicine in Barbados under the Medical Profession Act, 2011-1 (public view: Reg. #, Name of Medical Practitioner, Status = General Practitioner | Specialist).
| Value | Anchor |
|---|---|
| 5 | Matched by licence number. |
| 4 | Matched by name. |
| 3 | Register not machine-accessible; the clinic publishes the number. |
| 2 | Licence claimed without a number. |
| 1 | Public data contradicts the claim. |
M4 · Facility registration — weight 10
Whether the operating location is found in the facility register (where the country has one; otherwise this axis is not applicable).
Register class: Facility register — none in this country, so this axis is not applicable here.
| Value | Anchor |
|---|---|
| 5 | Record found: name, address and status match. |
| 4 | Record found with a spelling discrepancy. |
| 3 | Register exists; no record found (we do not claim 'unlicensed'). |
| 2 | Only the clinic's own statement. |
| 1 | A published registration number is contradicted by the register (verified false → flag). |
M5 · Legal-entity traceability — weight 8
Who is legally responsible: a legal entity in the company register, tied to the brand and the address.
Register class: Company register — CAIPO — Corporate Affairs and Intellectual Property Office (Government of Barbados): the national companies and business-names registry, exposed through the office's public 'Search Our Database' facility (fields returned: company name, registration number, registration category, registration date).
| Value | Anchor |
|---|---|
| 5 | Legal entity and registration number published and matched in the register. |
| 4 | Matched by name. |
| 3 | Legal entity named; register not accessible. |
| 2 | Brand only. |
| 1 | No legal entity found after a full pass (verified conflict → hold H2). |
M6 · Self-disclosure of identifiers — weight 10
Whether the clinic itself publishes the numbers needed to re-check it (licences, certificates with issuer). Disclosure is rewarded; a missing number is not a missing licence.
| Value | Anchor |
|---|---|
| 5 | All load-bearing numbers published with issuers. |
| 4 | Physician numbers published; facility or legal-entity numbers not. |
| 3 | Partial, without issuers. |
| 2 | Logos without numbers. |
| 1 | No identifiers at all. |
M7 · Advertising honesty — weight 12
A machine profile of the clinic’s own claims: outcome guarantees, ‘100% safe’, ‘No. 1’ or ‘best’ without an issuer, ‘unlimited grafts’, before/after presented as a promise, foreign boards presented as the national specialist board. Every deduction cites an exact quote with URL, locale and date.
| Value | Anchor |
|---|---|
| 5 | No pattern from the lexicon found. |
| 4 | One or two soft superlatives. |
| 3 | Systematic superlatives without guarantees. |
| 2 | Guarantee or ‘100%’-class statement (bright line; cap candidate). |
| 1 | Verified fake credential (flag + cap). |
M8 · Cross-locale consistency — weight 5
Whether facts agree across the language fronts of the clinic's own site (physician, numbers, accreditations) — a mechanical comparison of extracted fields.
| Value | Anchor |
|---|---|
| 5 | All load-bearing fields agree. |
| 4 | Spelling discrepancies. |
| 3 | Some facts appear on only one front. |
| 2 | A load-bearing fact (physician or number) differs. |
| 1 | Fronts contradict each other on credentials (H2 candidate). |
M9 · Patient documents — weight 5
Presence check for five document classes: informed consent, risks/contraindications, aftercare, revision policy, complaint route. Presence only — the quality of the documents is not assessed.
| Value | Anchor |
|---|---|
| 5 | All five classes published. |
| 4 | Four. |
| 3 | Two or three. |
| 2 | One. |
| 1 | None. |
The formula
Each axis value 1–5 is mapped to 0–1. The composite is the weighted average over the axes that hold a value: axes that are not applicable in this country and axes we could not verify drop out of the normalisation.
composite = 100 × Σ(weight × (value − 1) / 4) / Σ(weight of axes with a value) score = min(composite + focus adjustment, lowest active ceiling), clamped to 0…100
Coverage threshold: a score is published only when at least 75% of the applicable axis weight holds a sourced value. Below that the record shows 'verification pending' and carries no rank.
Focus adjustment
A mechanical classification from the clinic's own menu.
| Focus | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| specialist | 0 |
| aesthetic in general clinic | -2 |
| spa or salon addon | -5 |
Score ceilings
A ceiling is applied only from a verified-false finding — never from 'not found'. Each ceiling is rendered from a fixed template with the exact quote or register entry and its URL; no free text is written about a named clinic.
| Ceiling | Max score | What triggers it | Fixed wording |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verified false accreditation or licence claim | 45 | A claimed accreditation, board certification or licence is contradicted by the official register. Never applied on 'not found' alone. | The register {registry} (record dated {date}) does not confirm the credential claimed at {url}: “{quote}”. Under this methodology the score is capped at {cap}. The clinic has been offered a right of reply. |
| Outcome guarantee or ‘100% safe’-class statement | 65 | The clinic's own published text guarantees a result or absolute safety. Applied only with the exact quote. | The clinic's own page {url} ({locale}, {date}) states: “{quote}”. Under this methodology an outcome guarantee caps the score at {cap}. |
| Active sanction in a machine-readable official register | 45 | Exists only in countries whose registry map declares a sanctions register. Absence of a sanction is never a finding. | Entry in the {registry} register dated {date}: {url}. The score is capped at {cap} and the profile is held pending the clinic's right of reply. |
The sanctions ceiling exists only in countries with a machine-readable official sanctions register. In this country: no public register of this class in this country. Absence of a sanction is never a finding.
Holds
Positive verification by default; the hold ladder handles the cases where public records conflict or the physician cannot be identified.
| ID | Hold | Effect | Fixed wording |
|---|---|---|---|
| H1 | Clarification requested | profile provisional, no crown | A clarification has been requested from the clinic. The profile is provisional and carries no crown until it is resolved. |
| H2 | Material structural conflict | ceiling after the right-of-reply window (69), 14-day right-of-reply window | Public records show a material structural conflict ({detail}). After the right-of-reply window the score is capped at {cap}. |
| H3 | Responsible physician not identifiable | composite withheld, unranked | The responsible physician could not be identified from public sources. The composite score is withheld and the clinic is listed without a rank. |
Crowns and procedure slices
A crown is a boolean gate from register-verified axes — never from a clinic's claim. Within a crown, the order is the composite.
| Crown | Meaning | Gate |
|---|---|---|
| Specialist-led | The responsible physician holds a current, matching specialist certification in the official register (M1 = 5, official source) and is clearly identifiable (M2 ≥ 4). | M1 ≥ 5 (official register) · M2 ≥ 4 |
| Foreign-patient ready | The clinic is verified in the country's official foreign-patient register. Exists only where such a register exists. | no such register in this country — this crown does not exist here |
Procedure slices list the clinics whose own menu names the procedure (a sourced boolean), ranked by the composite:
Outcome quality
There is no independent measurement of treatment outcomes in this field, and we do not imitate one. The register facts already in the axes are the only quality-adjacent evidence we publish.
How the data is produced (unattended run)
- No score without a source — in two passes. A collector records the value, the quote and the URL; a separate verifier reloads the URL and looks for the quote by string match. If the quote is not found, the cell degrades to 'could not verify'.
- All negative wording is templated. Ceilings and holds are rendered from fixed strings plus the cited quote or register entry. Nothing free-form is written against a named clinic.
- The validator is the build gate. Every axis key must be present (null allowed, absence not), every citation must resolve, ceilings only from verified-false findings with a quote, weights must sum to 100, and superlatives in our own text fail the build.
- A checklist per record: at least two independent sources, the register map opened and cited, every axis either a sourced value or an explicit 'could not verify'.
- Right of reply without a human in the loop: messages to the contact form or corrections@ are processed as ordinary data input. A correction with a source is applied and logged; a statement without one is published next to the data and the score does not change.
Freshness
Each record shows the real date of its last check. Register axes (M1, M3, M4) are rechecked within 90 days; the advertising axis (M7) within 180 days. Every change is logged in the changelog and in the record's own history.
What this register does not do
- We do not measure treatment outcomes, surgical skill or complication rates.
- We do not see clinics without a public web presence.
- Register classes this country does not publish are named as unavailable; we never simulate a register.
- We take no money from clinics, we do not book, and we do not refer.
- Fame, review volume, domain age and social-media following are not scored anywhere.
Independence: we take no money from clinics, we do not book, we do not refer, and no position can be bought. Data changes only through sourced facts, for every clinic under the same rules.
This site is an independent research project provided 'as is'. Clinic names and public information are used for identification. Nothing here creates a doctor–patient or advisory relationship.
Methodology versions
| Date | Version | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 29 August 2026 | v1.0.0 | Initial public methodology: nine mechanical axes (M1–M9, weights summing to 100), 1–5 rubric per axis, weighted composite normalised over axes that hold a value, 75% coverage threshold, hold ladder H1–H3, score caps only from verified-false findings, focus penalty, registry-gated crowns. |