Before a private appointment, three things are worth knowing: that the doctor is who they say, that they are allowed to practise, and that they are a specialist in the thing you are seeing them about. All three are public information.
Find the GMC number
Every doctor practising in the UK has a seven-digit General Medical Council number. Many publish it on their own website, often in the footer or on an “about” page. If you cannot find it, ask. A clinic that is reluctant to give you a GMC number has told you something useful.
You can also search the register by name, but names are not unique and you may get several results. The number removes the ambiguity.
Search the medical register
Go to the General Medical Council’s online register and search by number or name. The entry is free to view and needs no account.
What comes back is short, and four things on it matter.
The four things to look for
Registration status. You want “registered”. Anything else — erased, suspended, voluntarily removed — means they should not be practising medicine in the UK.
Licence to practise. This is separate from registration and it is the part people miss. Registration says the doctor holds a recognised qualification. The licence is what permits them to work as a doctor, including writing prescriptions. A doctor can be registered without a licence, which happens after retirement or when someone has moved abroad. Someone in that position should not be seeing patients.
The Specialist Register. If the doctor calls themselves a consultant, they should normally appear on the Specialist Register for the specialty you are seeing them about. A consultant cardiologist is on it for cardiology. If someone is advertising as a consultant dermatologist and the register shows no specialist entry in dermatology, that is worth a question. There is a separate GP Register for general practitioners.
Restrictions. The register shows conditions, undertakings, warnings and suspensions where they apply. These are not common, and their presence does not always mean you should walk away — but you are entitled to know, and to ask about anything you find.
What the register does not tell you
It confirms a doctor is qualified, licensed and unrestricted. That is a floor, not a recommendation.
It does not tell you how experienced they are with your particular condition, how many of a given procedure they have performed, what their outcomes are, or whether their approach will suit you. It does not tell you whether they will be the person who actually sees you at a follow-up.
Those are things you have to ask, and the questions worth asking sets out which ones get useful answers.
Checking the clinic as well as the doctor
A doctor can be impeccably registered and working somewhere that is not.
In England, any organisation providing regulated clinical care must be registered with the Care Quality Commission. The CQC publishes its register, along with inspection reports and ratings, and you can search it by name or postcode. In Scotland this is Healthcare Improvement Scotland, in Wales Healthcare Inspectorate Wales, and in Northern Ireland the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority.
If a clinic in England is providing treatment and is not CQC-registered, that is a serious question rather than a technicality.
If the person is not a doctor
Plenty of people working in private healthcare are not doctors, and several protected titles are regulated by other bodies. Who regulates whom lists the main ones and how to check each.
Be aware that “doctor” is not itself a protected title in the UK. Someone with a PhD may legitimately use it, and someone with no relevant qualification at all may use it without breaking the law. What matters is GMC registration, not the word.
An address is not a credential
This site is called Harley Street Doctors Online, so it is worth saying plainly: a Harley Street address tells you where someone rents consulting rooms. Rooms there can be hired by the hour. The address carries a reputation built over two centuries, and that reputation does not transfer to everyone who books a room in it.
What the Harley Street area actually is explains how it works. The short version is that the register tells you about the doctor, and the postcode does not.