A rubric the clinic holds, not a list the publication holds
The obvious thing for a publication in this territory to do is publish a list of recommended suppliers. This publication does not, will not, and has no mechanism by which anybody could appear on one. There is no directory here, no ranking, no comparison and no award.
The reason is structural rather than modest. A publication cannot assess the competence of a supplier it has not worked with, and a list constructed without that assessment is a list of whoever asked. Lists of that kind exist in this sector and readers cannot tell them apart from assessed ones, which is precisely why an unassessed list is worse than none.
What is genuinely useful is the opposite arrangement: the clinic holds the criteria and applies them. The clinic can see what a supplier says in writing, whether they raise regulation unprompted, whether they will accept a specification, and whether they own the accounts. Those are assessable by the person in the room.
The criteria are chosen for one property: each is answerable in writing before any money changes hands, and each distinguishes between suppliers in a way that is visible to a non-specialist. Criterion ten does the most work of any of them.
How to apply the rubric
Send the ten criteria to the prospective supplier as questions, in writing, before any meeting. What comes back, and how quickly, scores several criteria on its own.
Score criterion one from whether they raised the advertising restrictions before you did. A supplier working in this sector who does not mention the position on prescription-only medicines unprompted has told you something.
Score criterion four by asking directly what they would do if you asked them to publish a claim they thought unsupportable. Hesitation is informative.
Score criterion seven by asking who owns the advertising account, the analytics property, the domain and the website. If the answer is the supplier, score 0 and resolve it before proceeding. This is the criterion that costs most to fix later.
Score criterion ten by asking what they would advise against. A supplier who agrees with every proposal you make is either agreeing to be agreeable or has no view.
Keep the written answers. They form the basis of the specification, and disagreements later are resolved by reference to them.
Common scoring errors
Assessing the presentation rather than the answers. Presentation quality is a supplier's core skill and tells you least.
Accepting verbal assurances on data and account ownership. Both criteria ask for written answers because both are expensive to resolve retrospectively.
Treating case studies as references. Criterion eight asks for contactable references in a comparable setting, and asks you to contact them.
Scoring enthusiasm as understanding. Criterion one is satisfied by specific knowledge of the restrictions, not by confidence about the sector.
Skipping criterion ten because it feels adversarial. It is the single most informative question in the rubric.
Specifying the work using this library
The most useful thing a clinic can do after selecting a supplier is hand them a specification, and the instruments in this library are written to serve as one.
Commissioning treatment pages: give them the treatment page quality rubric and state that acceptance requires a score of 30 or above with no criterion below 2. Commissioning website work: give them the technical foundations audit and require the criteria to be satisfied on delivery. Commissioning anything published: require it to pass the advertising compliance self-audit before it goes live.
This changes the relationship in a specific way. Acceptance becomes a matter of scoring rather than of opinion, which removes the most common source of dispute in clinic marketing. It also lets a good supplier demonstrate quality against a standard rather than argue for it.
Keep the approval step inside the clinic whatever the arrangement. Responsibility for what is published in your name does not transfer, and the capability decision matrix sets out which functions must remain internal for that reason.