Legal

Last updated 27 July 2026. Material changes to this page are dated.

This page sets out what this publication is, what it promises, and how its content may be used. The terms of use set out the terms on which the site is offered — what you may and may not do with it. Read them together.

What this site is — and is not

The Value Forge is an independent clinical intelligence publication. It synthesises published evidence from NHS practice, policy, and international health systems for a professional audience, under a published production method and constraint system.

It is not an NHS service or NHS publication. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, funded by, or produced on behalf of the National Health Service, NHS England, or any NHS trust, integrated care board, or other health body. References to “the NHS” describe the health service as the publication’s national subject, not any relationship with it. No NHS branding is used, and none may be inferred.

Not medical or professional advice

Nothing on this site is medical advice, and nothing here creates a clinician–patient relationship.

The content is editorial synthesis of published research and policy, written for a professional readership. It is not a substitute for the judgement of a qualified clinician with the patient in front of them, and it must not be used to make decisions about the diagnosis, treatment, or care of any individual. Never disregard, or delay seeking, professional medical advice because of something read here. If you need medical help, contact your GP or NHS 111; in an emergency, call 999.

The same limit applies professionally: nothing here constitutes commissioning, procurement, financial, or legal advice. Evidence summarised on this site carries explicit labels — Provisional and Contested findings are labelled precisely because they are not a settled basis for decisions. The labels are part of the content; a reader who ignores them is not reading the publication it publishes.

Accuracy, currency, and the limits of the promise

This publication is produced under a published constraint system designed to keep every claim tied to a verifiable source, and it maintains a public corrections process. That is a discipline, not a guarantee. Evidence changes; studies are revised, superseded, and retracted; errors are possible despite the system built to prevent them.

Content therefore speaks as of its stated date and is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied — including any warranty of accuracy, completeness, currency, or fitness for a particular purpose. Where content is found to be wrong, the remedy this publication offers is the one it promises: a dated, public correction.

Automated production

The Value Forge is produced substantially by automated large-language-model routines operating under a versioned constraint contract, with a human editor accountable for the whole. This is disclosed in full, including what the automation may never do, on How this publication is produced. That page also carries the publication’s independence and conflict-of-interest statement, including its complete separation from the editor’s employment.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, The Value Forge and its editor accept no liability for any loss or damage — direct, indirect, or consequential — arising from use of, or reliance on, anything published on this site. This does not exclude or limit any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

Licence, reuse, and intellectual property

The written content of this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, and adapt it, including commercially, provided you give proper attribution to The Value Forge with a link to the source page, indicate any changes, and do not imply that The Value Forge endorses you or your use.

What the licence does not cover. The name “The Value Forge”, its wordmark, and its visual identity are not licensed. They may not be used to brand, endorse, or pass off any other publication, product, or service, and reuse of content must not present the reusing party as this publication or as approved by it.

On the method itself. The analytical traditions this publication draws on — formal logic, the Socratic method, probabilistic reasoning, the scientific method, first-principles analysis — belong to no one and never will; this publication claims nothing over them. What is original here, and what the publication asserts its rights in as a body of editorial work, is the specific synthesis: the value-added-time editorial framework, the constraint contract and its invariants, the pattern register discipline, and their expression across this site.

The editor’s request. The CC BY licence permits commercial reuse of the content, and that permission is real. Alongside it, the editor states a preference that is a request rather than a licence term: that this framework and production process not be replicated for profit, and that anything built from this work names its source and carries the same honesty rules forward — the constraint system is the point, not a decoration. This publication was built not-for-profit, generates no income, and exists so that the synthesis is available to everyone; the request is that it stay that way downstream.

Third-party content and links

Cited studies, guidance, and policy documents remain the property of their publishers; citation is not endorsement, and this publication is not responsible for the content of external sites it links to. Rights in third-party material are unaffected by this site’s licence.

Privacy

This is a static site, and you can read all of it without giving us anything.

We do not track you. There is no analytics of any kind — no Google Analytics, no Plausible, Fathom, Matomo or equivalent, no tag manager, no advertising or social pixels, and no “anonymised” measurement either. The site sets no cookies at all. Search runs entirely inside your browser; typing a query sends nothing to us. Fonts are served from this site rather than a font network. There are no third-party scripts, trackers, or embedded images: the only external addresses on a normal page are ordinary links you can choose to click.

That is a deliberate position, not an oversight, and it is checkable — the site’s full source is public.

Who does touch anything, and what they get:

• Netlify hosts the site and provides its DNS. Serving a page necessarily involves your IP address and browser reaching their servers, and they process standard server logs under Netlify’s privacy policy. We do not receive, request, or store those logs.
• GoDaddy is the domain registrar and nothing more. The domain’s nameservers are Netlify’s, so no visit to this site — and not even a DNS lookup for it — reaches GoDaddy. They hold the registration record, not your data.
• Google processes feedback-form submissions, and only if you choose to send one. The form is not yet live; while it is not, nothing of Google’s loads on any page here.
• MailerLite stores your email address, and only if you choose to subscribe.

If you never subscribe and never send feedback, the complete record of you held by this publication is nothing at all.

The email edition. If you subscribe, we hold the email address you give us, and nothing else. The lawful basis is your consent, given by subscribing — UK direct-marketing rules require an opt-in for email of this kind, and subscribing is that opt-in. The address is used solely to send you this publication: never sold, rented, or shared for anyone else’s marketing, and never used to profile you. There is no subscriber list at all until you join one.

Emails are sent using MailerLite, which stores and sends on our behalf as our data processor, under their terms. That arrangement governs what MailerLite does with the data; it does not transfer any responsibility away from this publication. We remain the controller, and requests about your data are ours to answer.

Unsubscribing and erasure are two different things, and you can ask for either. Every email carries a working unsubscribe link, which stops us sending to you. Erasure goes further and deletes your record entirely; ask through the feedback route, including the address you subscribed with so we can find it, and we will action it in MailerLite. We keep your address only while you are subscribed.

Feedback. Collected through an embedded Google Form; anything you submit there is processed by Google under Google’s privacy policy.

The form has no email field, and cannot identify you. No account, no registration, no address, no name — we deliberately do not ask, because we do not reply and an address collected for a reply that never comes is data held for no reason. So unless you type identifying detail into the free-text box yourself, we hold no personal data about you from the form at all, and there is nothing arising from it to request, correct, or erase. Please don’t type it in; it is not wanted and will be deleted.

We do not write back. Where something sent to us changes what we do, we may record the theme and the outcome, anonymised — most submissions will not appear. We never publish your identity or any identifying detail. The full handling is on the feedback page and in the terms of use.

Your rights. Under UK data protection law you may ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct or erase it, or withdraw consent at any time. There is very little to ask about — an email address, or nothing at all — but the route is real: use the feedback route and we will action it. Using a processor does not move these obligations; they remain ours.

This is the one thing the feedback disclaimer does not touch. Elsewhere we say plainly that we do not reply to feedback and are not obliged to act on it. That is about suggestions and editorial judgement. It has no application to a data protection request: those are your rights in law, not requests for a favour, and they are answered whether or not we agree with anything else you sent.

How to make one, given the form asks for no address. Send it through the feedback form, say plainly that it is a data protection request, and — for this one purpose — include the email address you subscribed with. We ask you not to put personal detail in that box for any other reason, but here it is necessary and deliberate: the mailing list is keyed on the address, so without it there is no record for us to find, and a request we cannot match is a request we cannot action. That address is used to answer your request and for nothing else, is not carried into the triage staging, and is deleted with the record.

Data controller. This publication is produced by an individual editor in a personal capacity; that editor is the data controller. The editor publishes anonymously at present (why), and a request that genuinely requires identifying the controller — a regulator’s enquiry, or a rights request we cannot otherwise satisfy — will be answered rather than deflected.

Governing law

This site is published from the United Kingdom. These terms, and any dispute arising from use of the site, are governed by the law of England and Wales.

Contact

Questions about this page, requests concerning reuse, and challenges to published findings all go through the feedback route.