Several regulators ask for the same kind of document under different names: a way for a patient or client to complain, proof of who is registered to practise, and in some professions a record of what the practice charges or how it runs. Which of these apply to a website, and what each one has to contain, depends on the body governing that profession.

Complaints procedures

The Care Quality Commission (CQC), which regulates dental practices, GP practices and care settings in England, expects a practice to make clear how a patient can raise a complaint, and many practices publish that procedure on the website. The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) Practice Standards Scheme expects the same of accredited veterinary practices. The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) goes further for law firms: the website has to say how to complain to the firm and, where that does not resolve things, how to complain to the Legal Ombudsman.

Registration numbers

The General Dental Council (GDC) requires a dental practice website to show the registration number of each dentist named on it. The General Medical Council (GMC), the General Optical Council (GOC), the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and the RCVS each keep their own register, and each expects a practitioner's number to appear wherever that practitioner is named on the site. See What has to appear on a dental practice website for how this plays out in detail for one profession.

Price and service information

The SRA's Transparency Rules require firms to publish price and service information for a specified list of legal services, such as conveyancing and uncontested probate, directly on the website. Where a fee changes, the requirement is that the published figure changes with it, and Fees, price lists and the expensive kind of out of date covers what that means in practice.

Statements of purpose and practice standards

The CQC requires a registered service to make its statement of purpose, what the service does and who it is for, available to the people using it, and many CQC-regulated practices publish this document on the website itself. The RCVS Practice Standards Scheme has its own equivalent for accredited veterinary practices.

This page names what each body expects to be public. It does not check whether a particular practice's website currently meets that expectation, and the named body's own current guidance is the authority on the detail.

A published policy on a practice website carries a version date, the date the text now showing was written, and often a review date, the date the practice intends to look at it again. Where a policy changes, whichever came from the paper folder or the practice management system, the website copy needs updating to match, or it stops being the current version.

What an inspector checks

Where a website and a printed or filed copy of the same policy disagree, an inspector working from either document is working from an out of date one. The practical check is simple: does the version on the website carry the same date as the version in current use, and if the two were compared side by side today, would they read the same?

This is a live document. A policy that was correct when the site was built can drift out of step after a review, an amendment, or a change of approach, with nobody responsible for carrying that change across to the website.

Keeping the two in step

• Note the version date on the website copy whenever the underlying policy is reviewed or amended.
• Check the website text against the current working copy at the same point the working copy is reviewed.
• Where a review date is shown on the website, treat it as a date by which the comparison above should have happened again.

Which documents a regulator expects to find published in the first place, and by which body, is covered on What has to appear on a dental practice website. The same drift applies to a published fee schedule, covered separately on Fees, price lists and the expensive kind of out of date. A practice working through this on a fixed schedule may find the routine set out in The annual website review a practice manager can actually run a more workable way to catch it than waiting for a policy amendment to be remembered.

A published policy on a website is only useful while it says the same thing as the version a practice actually works to. When the two drift apart, the website copy is the one a visitor sees first, so keeping it matched to the current version is a website task in its own right, separate from writing or approving the policy.

What to check when a policy changes

When a policy is reviewed and a new version is agreed, the website copy needs the same update. In practice that means the text on the page, not just a linked document, because a downloaded PDF sitting behind an old link can outlast several review cycles without anyone noticing.

• The version or date shown on the page matches the version currently in use
• Any linked document opens the current file.
• Wording changed in the review is changed on the page itself.

Version dates and review dates on the page

Two dates do different jobs on a published policy. A version date says when the text was last changed. A review date says when it is next due to be looked at, whether or not anything changes. Showing both lets a visitor tell the difference between a policy that has been checked recently and one that has simply not changed in a while.

Where a website and an internal folder disagree on which version is current, the website is what a member of the public has read and relied on. That is the version worth checking first when a discrepancy is found, before working out which one is wrong.

The annual review checklist sets out how to catch this kind of drift on a fixed schedule, alongside the other pages that tend to go out of date at the same rate as policies do. Where a policy is one of the documents a regulator expects to be public, the earlier sections of this page cover which ones by profession and by body.