One rule, strictly applied
Of everything in the compliance section of this library, this is the criterion with the clearest rule and the widest gap between rule and practice. Prescription-only medicines may not be advertised to the public in the United Kingdom. The position is set out in medicines regulation and reflected in the advertising codes, and the MHRA Blue Guide explains how it is applied.
The rule does not have a size threshold, a good-faith exception or an educational carve-out that permits promotional naming. It does not distinguish between a paid advertisement and a caption written between patients. It applies to the clinic's own material and to material published on the clinic's behalf.
The workarounds are well known and none of them work. Abbreviating the name, misspelling it deliberately, replacing letters with symbols, using a hashtag rather than body text, showing the packaging without naming it, or letting a patient name it and then resharing the post. The test applied is whether the public would understand what is meant, and in every one of these cases they plainly do.
What a clinic may do is describe the treatment. Explaining what a class of treatment does, who it suits, what it involves and what it costs is not promotion of a specific medicine, and the treatment page quality rubric sets out what such a description should contain. Most clinics find, when they make the change, that product-neutral material is clearer for patients who do not know brand names in the first place.
How to sweep every surface
List the surfaces before searching them: website pages, blog archive, price list, downloadable documents, every social account including ones no longer updated, paid advertising accounts, third-party directory listings you populate, printed material still in circulation, and staff personal accounts used professionally.
Search each for the product names used in your sector, then for each abbreviation, common misspelling and symbol substitution. Search hashtags separately, because they are often excluded from a body-text search.
In paid advertising accounts, check the fields the public does not see: campaign names, asset names, keyword lists and audience names. These are frequently full of product names and are frequently overlooked, and in some platforms they surface publicly in ways the advertiser did not anticipate.
Check images by looking rather than by searching. Packaging, vials and branded promotional materials appear in clinic photography constantly, usually incidentally.
Score each criterion 0 to 3. Where you find a single instance, score that criterion 0 and record where it was. The purpose of the sweep is the list, not the total.
Common scoring errors
Searching only the current website. Archived posts remain published and remain findable.
Treating a hashtag as different from text. It is public-facing material naming the product.
Assuming a patient's own words are exempt when you reshare them. Amplification makes it yours.
Overlooking the price list. Price lists organised by product name are one of the commonest instances and one of the easiest to fix, since the treatment name works better commercially anyway.
Excluding practitioners' personal accounts. Where a practitioner posts about work done at your clinic, the material advertises your clinic.
Rewriting product-led material
The rewrite is usually less painful than clinics fear, because product names carry less meaning to prospective patients than the sector assumes. Replacing a product name with a description of what the treatment does tends to improve the material for readers who are not already familiar with the category.
Describe the treatment by what it addresses, how it works in general terms, how long it takes, what the recovery involves and what it costs. That is what the intent coverage gap analysis asks for anyway, and material written to that specification rarely needs a product name to function.
Where a patient asks about a specific product, answer them in the consultation. A clinical conversation about an individual's own treatment is not advertising, and nothing in this checklist suggests a clinician should be evasive with a patient in front of them.
Write the rule down in one sentence and give it to everybody who publishes anything, including practitioners posting from personal accounts and any third party engaged to produce content. Then check quarterly. This is the one area in the compliance section where the check is worth running more often than the others, because a single post reintroduces the exposure.