Verification Policy

There are two badges, and they are not the same claim. A person carries Licence checked. A clinic, hospital, community health centre, or counselling centre carries Licence & permit checked.

Either badge means exactly three things, and nothing beyond them: someone at Mindcare looked at the documents; the registration or permit number on those documents was matched against the issuing body's own records; and that happened on the date shown next to the badge.

The date is part of the claim, not decoration. “Checked” without a date reads like a permanent state, and no check is permanent.

It is not a rating, a recommendation, or a judgement about the quality of anyone's work. Holding a valid licence and being the right person to help you are different questions, and only the first one is something a document can answer.

It is not a check of complaint or disciplinary history. If that ever becomes part of the process, it will be said here plainly and it will get its own wording — not folded quietly into an existing badge.

It does not transfer. A verified care centre does not make the people who practise there verified, and a verified professional does not verify the building. Working somewhere is not a credential. That is why the two badges are worded differently even when they sit on the same page.

It is not a guarantee of availability, price, or fit, and it is not a safety assessment.

First, that the person asking for the listing is the person the documents belong to. This step is separate from the document check and cannot be skipped by having the documents. Copies of registration certificates circulate widely — through job applications, insurer credentialing, permit paperwork — so holding a copy proves nothing about whose it is.

Then the documents themselves: a national registration certificate for the profession, and a local permit to practise, which is issued for a named place of practice and carries an expiry date. Membership of a professional association can be submitted as well, but it is treated as supporting information, not as the licence.

An operating permit for the facility, and a facility registration number that can be matched against the health ministry's public records. An accreditation status may be submitted too, but it is recorded as supporting information and is not part of what the badge asserts — accreditation is a quality judgement made by an accrediting body, and this badge deliberately makes none.

For a facility there is also a step proving that whoever is managing the listing is authorised to speak for the place — a listing for a hospital has no obvious owner, and that is exactly the gap someone else could walk into.

Public facilities are a deliberate exception to the rule that a check starts with a submission. A community health centre or public hospital can be checked by Mindcare directly from the health ministry's open records, with nobody applying on its behalf. The reason is a bias we would otherwise build in: if a badge could only be earned by applying for it, private clinics with marketing staff would collect badges while the most affordable public services went unmarked — and that gap would land hardest on the people with the least room to pay.

Permits expire. A badge that never expires slowly turns into a lie without anyone editing anything, so every check is stored with the earliest expiry date among the documents behind it. When that date passes, the badge is removed.

A badge is also re-confirmed periodically even while the documents are still valid, because the detail most likely to change is not the licence — it is where someone practises.

An absent badge is not an accusation. A listing with no badge may not have applied, may be waiting for review, or may have a document whose date has passed. Those are very different situations, and none of them is a finding about the person or the place. Because the page cannot tell you which one it is, it does not guess: the badge is simply not there. Nothing on a public page says “expired” or “rejected” about anyone.

What is stored against a listing is the outcome of the check, the date it happened, and where the record came from. Not the documents themselves indefinitely: uploaded files are held only as long as the review needs them, are never reachable from the public site, and are deleted after that.

Registration and permit numbers are never shown on a public page. Once a number is published it cannot be unpublished, and displaying it buys the reader nothing they can act on.

A badge on the wrong listing is worse than no badge at all, so corrections take priority over new checks. The reporting channel is not open yet — like the rest of the site, it is still being built, and pointing you at an address that nobody reads would be its own small dishonesty. It will be linked from this page and from the footer as soon as it works.

In an emergency, do not wait for a directory. Contact local emergency services or go to the nearest hospital.