About Leading Rehabs

We founded our company in 2023 with one clear goal: to help ultra-high-net-worth individuals connect to the best treatment centres for mental health and substance abuse in the world. To achieve this, we provide unique and in-depth insights into the discreet and luxurious world of the world's leading rehab facilities.

Every insight comes from due diligence, not marketing. We check licences in state registers and look up regulator findings, court records, ownership structures and independent press. Then we compare what each clinic says about itself with what official sources show. In this market, a high price and a beautiful setting say little about clinical quality, and many "best rehab" lists are paid placements. No clinic can pay to be listed, ranked or moved up on Leading Rehabs.

Our attitude

A family that chooses a clinic for someone in crisis usually has days, not months, and very little it can verify on its own. The brochure is beautiful, the admissions team is warm, and the price suggests the best. We treat that moment the way a careful investor treats a deal: assume nothing, check everything that can be checked, and write down what could not be checked.

That leads to a few habits we keep:

  • We start from records and proof, not from the clinic. A licence register, an inspection report or a court file is worth more to us than any amount of website copy.
  • We score what a clinic publishes, and we hold it to it. A clinic's own statements count, but only as self-declared. They never confirm anything on their own, and if a regulator record or an independent report contradicts them, the clinic loses points.
  • We record what we did not find. When we search a register and find nothing, that search is logged with its date and source. Our first edition contains 895 such search records.
  • We say how sure we are. Every criterion carries a confidence level (high, medium or low), and a score resting only on a clinic's own word can never be rated high.
  • We name the gaps. Where evidence is missing, the assessment says so rather than guessing in the clinic's favour or against it.

How our due diligence works

For every clinic we look at, we work through the same sequence.

  1. Licence and legal status. Is the facility licensed for what it offers, by which authority, and under which category? We check the register entry itself, not a logo on the clinic's website.
  2. Regulator standing and track record. Inspection findings, enforcement action, sanctions, court cases and settlements.
  3. Ownership. Who owns the clinic, who owns the owner, and which other clinics sit in the same group. Ownership links between assessed clinics are published.
  4. Clinicians. Named senior clinicians are checked against professional registers. Titles such as "professor" or "chief psychiatrist" have to be traceable.
  5. What the clinic promises. Prices, programme length, number of clients, staff ratios, medical cover, aftercare. We record each promise and test it against the other sources.
  6. Independent reporting. Named outlets, with a byline and a date, reporting what a journalist saw or was told on the record.

Our first edition assesses 80 clinics against ten criteria, with 3,298 linked evidence items. 71 clinics are ranked. 9 are excluded, each with a stated reason.

The ten criteria

Each criterion is worth up to 10 points, with equal weight, for a total of 100.

  1. Client separation and occupancy
  2. Clinical governance and medical cover
  3. Diagnostic depth on admission
  4. Clinical intensity
  5. Continuity and aftercare
  6. Admission integrity and commercial conduct
  7. Transparency toward the client
  8. Track record and regulator standing
  9. Environment, safety and nutrition
  10. Clinical seniority and academic standing

Setting, cuisine and comfort matter to our clients, and they are part of criterion 9. They are one tenth of the score, not the whole of it.

What never counts

Some sources look like evidence and are not. They never add a single point:

  • marketing language without a checkable source ("world-class", "bespoke", "leading experts")
  • badges, seals and certificates a clinic or its own group awards itself
  • paid, sponsored or pay-to-enter awards
  • listings, "verified" badges and figures on directories and aggregator sites
  • "best rehab" pages published by a clinic, its group or a site linked to it
  • sponsored articles, advertorials and press releases
  • review counts and star averages
  • social media posts and professional networking profiles
  • stories centred on an identifiable patient
  • our own earlier scores and profiles

An open standard: check our work

Our method is published in full as the Leading Rehabs Open Assessment Standard (LROAS). It contains the criteria, the scoring bands, the evidence rules, the tie-breaks and the data formats, under a CC BY 4.0 licence. Anyone can read it, use it, criticise it or build on it.

The standard is written so that every public score can be recomputed from the outside. Each ranking edition is frozen, dated and published with its evidence and a cryptographic fingerprint (a SHA-256 hash) of every input. A journalist, a family office, a regulator or an AI assistant can take the same evidence, apply the same rules and arrive at the same number. If they arrive at a different number, we want to hear about it. Accepted corrections are published in an errata log that shows the old value and the new one.

Rules change in public too. A proposed change is published with its expected effect on scores, open for comment, and only takes effect in a later version. A rule is never changed to help or harm a particular clinic, and a published score is never quietly rewritten.

Where we are not yet fully transparent, and why

Openness has limits we would rather state than hide.

  • Sealed evidence. Some evidence cannot be published: a licence ruling the authority itself does not publish, or a clinic document that contains patient or commercial confidential information. We publish that such an item exists, which criterion it affects, its type, the date we received it and its fingerprint. We never publish its content. A state or regulatory authority, or a journalist at an established publication, may inspect it under a confidentiality undertaking, and the result of every inspection is published.
  • Clinical seniority (criterion 10). We publish the points, but some of the inputs would let readers work out a clinic's capacity and staffing in detail. Those inputs are held for inspection.
  • No independent reviewer yet. The standard provides for an independent reviewer of rule changes and of any clinic we have a tie to. That person or body has not been appointed. Until it is, we say so wherever a review would apply.

For clinics

You cannot pay to be assessed, to be assessed sooner, to have evidence checked faster, to be ranked higher or to be left out. No advertising or commercial arrangement can touch a score, and our ranking calculation does not read any commercial data.

You can send us evidence and corrections (providers@leadingrehabs.com). Documents you supply might not change your public score, which rests on public evidence only. Once verified, they can change your extended score, which is shown separately. Every correction request is recorded and answered, and there is an appeal route with fixed deadlines.

The fastest way to a higher score is to change the reality we measure: publish your prices, your licence and your senior clinicians, separate your clients properly, and give people an honest picture before they arrive. Attempts to game the criteria are recorded and sanctioned.

A critical look at other rehab rankings

Most people find a luxury clinic through a list. Before trusting one, it helps to know how most of these lists are made.

Many are advertising. A large share of "best rehab" lists sell placement, featured spots or "premium profiles". The ranking follows the budget, and the reader is rarely told.

Many are owned by the clinics they rank. Some apparently neutral guides and comparison sites belong to a treatment group or to a referral business paid per admission. The top spots go to the owner or to whoever pays the commission. Hotlines on such sites often route callers to the highest bidder, not the best fit. Addiction treatment has a long history of these practices: Google restricted rehab advertising in 2017 after deceptive lead-generation schemes became widespread, and the United States criminalised kickbacks for patient referrals in 2018.

Awards are for sale. A number of award organisers charge for entry, for the winner's package or for the right to display the logo. A clinic with a wall of awards may simply have a marketing budget.

Stars measure mood, not medicine. Review averages reward hospitality and are easy to manipulate. A former patient is rarely in a position to judge diagnostic quality, medical cover or what happened after discharge.

Directories copy what clinics tell them. Capacity, staff ratios and "accreditation verified" badges on aggregator sites are usually supplied by the clinic and rarely checked.

Almost none show their working. Few publishers say which criteria they use, how they weight them, which sources they checked or who they have financial ties to. A ranking without a method cannot be checked, and a ranking that cannot be checked deserves little trust, including ours.

Questions to ask of any list, ours included:

  • Can a clinic pay to appear, to rank higher or to be removed?
  • Are the criteria and weights published?
  • Which official sources were checked?
  • Can you see why a clinic got its score, criterion by criterion?
  • When was it last checked, and how are errors corrected?

If a list cannot answer these questions, treat it as advertising. We publish our answers so that you can hold us to them.

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