Editorial policy

Pharmacy information goes stale fast. Services launch and get decommissioned, opening hours move, premises relocate, pharmacies close. So we treat accuracy as maintenance, not a box to tick at launch.

The short version

• Everything we publish is built from official, publicly available data and our own checks of each pharmacy
• Pages carry their data date, so you can judge freshness yourself
• No pharmacy or company can pay to appear, disappear, or rank better — there is no paid tier at all
• We don’t publish reviews or star ratings, and we don’t remove a pharmacy because someone asked
• When we get something wrong, we fix it and say so

Where our information comes from

We use a strict hierarchy of sources, and we name them on the page wherever it matters.

Primary source — the official list. The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) publishes the official list of community pharmacies in England with active NHS contracts: names, addresses, ODS codes and contract status. Every pharmacy in our directory starts life as a record in this dataset.

Supporting sources.

• The NHS website (nhs.uk) — each pharmacy’s profile, and descriptions of services such as Pharmacy First, blood pressure checks, flu vaccination and the New Medicine Service
• Each pharmacy’s own website — for opening hours and services
• GOV.UK and NHS England — for national service specifications and guidance

Sources we don’t use: scraped reviews, unverified third-party directories, and anything we can’t trace back to an official record or the pharmacy itself. Corrections sent to us are checked against those sources before anything changes. If a detail can’t be verified, we leave it out.

How a page gets made

1. Pull the data. The NHSBSA pharmacy contractor data is imported and cleaned — duplicate records resolved, closed pharmacies removed, new contracts added.
2. Organise. Every pharmacy is mapped to its town and county, so town pages reflect the real geographic spread of provision, not guesswork.
3. Cross-check. Opening hours, services and contact details are checked against the pharmacy’s NHS website profile and its own website.
4. Research the demand side. Before writing a town page, we review what people in that area actually search for when they need a pharmacy — the questions, the wording, the gaps in current results. The page is then written to answer those questions using the verified data, not to chase keywords.
5. Write from official specifications. Service descriptions come from NHS service specifications — we describe what the service covers, never how a condition should be treated.
6. Date and publish. Every page shows when its data was last refreshed.

Software helps us organise and check large datasets, but every published page is reviewed and edited by a person before it goes live. On top of that, service descriptions and guides are reviewed by Regina Agada, a GPhC-registered pharmacist (GPhC 2231463), who checks that what we say about NHS services matches how those services actually work in practice.

How pages stay current

Corrections

Mistakes get made; the test is what happens next. If you spot an error — a wrong phone number, a pharmacy that has closed, a service we’ve listed that isn’t offered — email info@pharmacycompare.uk or use the correction form with the page and, if you can, the source. We check it against the official record and correct the page. Where a correction is significant, we note the change on the page.

We will never remove or alter a listing because a pharmacy, chain or other party asked us to without a factual basis.

Independence

Pharmacy Compare has no advertising, no affiliate links, no sponsored content and no paid listings of any kind. It is self-funded. Nobody can pay to appear in, be removed from, or be repositioned within the directory. The full picture is on our funding page.

What we don’t publish

• Medical advice — not what symptoms mean, not what to take, not whether to see a doctor. For that, the NHS website and a qualified professional exist, and we link to both. See our medical disclaimer.
• User reviews or ratings — a directory we can’t verify is a liability, not a feature
• Sponsored content — no exceptions, including “sponsored town guides”
• Email addresses taken from other websites

Questions about any of this

Email info@pharmacycompare.uk. A real person reads every message.