Editorial Policy
This policy sets out where our information comes from, how we check it, and how we label the things we could not confirm. It applies to every hospital profile, check-up package page, condition guide and research summary we publish.
What we are trying to do
Our job is to make Chinese hospital information usable in English: accurate enough that you can shortlist hospitals, honest enough that you know what we did not manage to confirm, and specific enough to act on. We would rather write "we could not find this published" than fill a gap with a plausible guess.
Our sources, in order of preference
| Rank | Source type | Used for | How we cite it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The hospital's own website and published documents | Departments, campuses, addresses, contact lines, published price lists, international department details | Named on the page, with the date we retrieved it where we have one |
| 2 | Government and regulator publications | Hospital grade, licensing, national clinical research centre designations, pricing policy | Named issuing body |
| 3 | Peer-reviewed journals and conference abstracts | Clinical claims in research summaries | Journal and study name, linked |
| 4 | The Fudan hospital rankings | Specialty reputation claims | Named explicitly as the Fudan rankings |
| 5 | Our own coordination experience | Practical notes on process, timing and what to prepare | Labelled as experience, not as a sourced fact |
Where a lower-ranked source disagrees with a higher-ranked one, we follow the higher-ranked source and say so.
How we write hospital profiles
- We read the hospital's own Chinese-language site first. Chinese department names are translated by us, and a department being listed means the hospital offers it in general — not that it will be offered to any particular patient.
- We distinguish what a hospital publishes about itself from what we have verified independently. A profile is not an endorsement and does not imply the hospital has reviewed it.
- Details change. A profile is written as a snapshot, and practical details — phone numbers, department locations, who answers international enquiries — should always be re-confirmed with the hospital before you travel.
Rankings, “No. 1” and volume claims
- Specialty reputation. If we call a hospital top-ranked for a specialty, that refers to the Fudan hospital rankings' peer-review specialty list, and we name the ranking as the source.
- Clinical volume. If we say a hospital performs the most procedures or cycles of a kind, that is an activity figure — annual surgeries, outpatient visits, IVF cycles — and we label it as volume, not as reputation.
- We do not publish our own composite ranking, and we do not reorder our directory by perceived quality. Directory listings are organised by region.
Prices and currency
Many of our check-up pages quote prices in US dollars converted from a renminbi list price. Unless a page says otherwise, the conversion uses a reference rate of CNY 6.8 to USD 1 and is rounded up to the nearest ten dollars.
These figures are reference amounts, not quotes. They assume nothing about your age, sex, medical history or which tier of service you use, and Chinese hospital price lists are revised. International and VIP departments of public hospitals are usually priced separately from the standard outpatient tariff. Always ask the hospital for a written estimate before you commit.
Translation and editorial assistance
Most of our sources are published in Chinese. We translate them into English ourselves, and we use machine assistance for drafting and for checking terminology before a human editor revises the result. Every summary is edited by a person before publication, and every summary links to the source it came from so you can read the original.
Translation involves judgement. Specialist Chinese clinical terms do not always map cleanly onto English ones, and where a term is ambiguous we keep the Chinese name alongside our rendering.
Advertising, sponsorship and conflicts of interest
We do not sell positions in the hospital directory and we do not accept payment to alter a description, a price or a caveat. Nothing in our content is written by or for a hospital.
Anyone writing or editing for us must disclose any employment, shareholding or personal relationship with a hospital, insurer or medical travel company mentioned in their work. Where a conflict exists, they do not write that piece.
Corrections
Hospital information goes out of date quickly. If something here is wrong, email [email protected] or use the contact form and tell us what you saw and, if you can, what the correct information is.
We check corrections against a source from our hierarchy above. Substantive factual corrections are applied to the page and noted in the page's update line. If a correction affects something a reader might have relied on, such as a price or a contact route, we say so explicitly rather than editing silently.
Status of this policy
This policy describes the standard we hold ourselves to now. Some older research summaries were published before every part of it was written down; we are working through them, and anything we find that falls short gets corrected or labelled. If you spot one, please tell us.