Method
Sources and method
On a health subject the method is the product. This page states exactly which sources are allowed onto this site, and what happens to a claim that has none.
This site accepts a short list of sources and refuses everything else. The accepted list is the NHS, the Royal College of Radiologists, the UK Health Security Agency and the Public Health England publications it inherited, the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine, the International Commission on Radiological Protection, the Health and Care Professions Council, the Society of Radiographers, the Care Quality Commission, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and UK legislation as published on legislation.gov.uk. Those are the bodies that either write the rules, register the professionals, or publish the patient information the National Health Service itself uses.
What is refused
Commercial imaging websites, private clinic pages, encyclopaedias, forums, news reports and other explanatory sites are not sources here, however accurate they may happen to be. Nor is a machine written summary of any of the above. The reason is simple: a second hand figure cannot be dated, and an undated figure on a health page is a liability that grows quietly as the source moves on without it.
How a figure reaches a page
A number is read at its source, and the page records what the source is, what it says, and when it was read. If a source publishes a range, the page prints the range rather than the midpoint. If a source has been superseded, the page says which edition it is quoting. If no accepted source publishes the figure at all, the page says that no primary source publishes it, which is a more useful sentence than an invented average.
The same rule applies to the things that are not numbers. A description of how an examination runs is written from published patient information, not from imagination or from a memory of a hospital visit. A statement about who may do what is written from the regulation or from the register, not from custom.
The line this site does not cross
There is a difference between explaining a procedure and advising a person, and it is the whole editorial line of this publication. Explaining is describing what an examination is, what it measures, how the appointment is normally organised, and what a word on the form means. Advising is telling a particular reader what to do. This site does the first and refuses the second, including in the softened forms that are easy to slip into: no page here says what a reader should ask for, should worry about, or should do next.
Corrections
Every page carries the date of the work that produced it. Nothing on this site is backdated and nothing is given a future date to look fresh. When a page is corrected, the correction is made in the page itself and the date is changed to the day the correction was made, so that the date on a page always describes real work rather than a publishing schedule. Corrections can be sent through contact the desk, and the responsibilities behind them are set out on the editorial policy.