How to read a clinic listing before you go
Opening hours, clinic type and CHAS status each come from a different source with a different reliability. Knowing which is which saves a wasted trip.
A clinic page on this site is assembled from four or five separate public sources, and they are not equally reliable. Here is how to weigh them.
The licence is the solid part
Name, address, phone number and licence status come from the Ministry of Health licensed clinic register. Every clinic listed here holds a current licence, and the HCI code shown on each page is the identifier you can check against MOH’s own register.
If a clinic’s licence lapses, it leaves the register and it leaves this site.
Opening hours are the soft part
About half of all licensed clinics publish opening hours anywhere a machine can read them. Where they do, the hours usually come from the CHAS clinic locator or the clinic’s own website.
Neither is perfect. The CHAS feed contains a small number of intervals that are plainly wrong — a closing time before the opening time, for instance — and when we spot one we flag it rather than quietly correcting it, because guessing what a clinic meant is worse than telling you to call.
Where hours are missing entirely, the page says “not published”. It does not show a blank or an invented default.
Clinic type is sometimes derived
Some clinics are typed by the register itself. For others, we work it out from the doctors on record: a clinic staffed entirely by doctors on the SDC register is a dental clinic whether or not anyone wrote that down.
For 490 clinics we have no signal at all, and those show no type. Not “general clinic”, not “other” — nothing. An invented category would be a guess dressed as a fact.
CHAS tells you something, its absence tells you nothing
A CHAS marker means the clinic is on the CHAS participating list. That is a positive fact from a specific source.
The absence of a marker is not evidence that a clinic does not participate. It may simply not appear in the feed we can read. This is why the clinic filter offers “CHAS clinics” and does not offer “non-CHAS clinics”: the second category would be built out of missing data.
The practical version
Call before you go, especially outside weekday mornings. Every clinic page has the number, 98% of them have one on the register, and a thirty-second call settles hours, walk-in policy and whether the doctor you want is in that day — none of which any directory can tell you with certainty.