How to Vet a Swiss Clinic: Our Checks and the Ones You Can Run

How we choose clinics, and what you can check yourself

You can vet a Swiss clinic, and the doctors who would treat you, largely from public registers and federal data. This page sets out those checks in a sensible order, what each source shows, where to find it and where its limits lie.

First, our own position, as it stands on our about page. Switzerland Clinics is a concierge team that matches patients with clinics in our network. Certification is the entry requirement, not the standard: we assess outcomes, consultant tenure and behaviour when things go wrong. Compensation is uniform across the network, so no clinic can buy preference. We decline a meaningful share of enquiries: emergencies, conditions better treated at home, expectations no clinic can meet. Swiss medical confidentiality is protected by criminal law, and we operate to the same standard in everything before and around treatment; the legal detail is in our note on patient confidentiality in Switzerland.

None of that requires you to take our word for anything. The checks below work on any Swiss clinic, including the ones we suggest.

How to vet a Swiss clinic: the checks in order

The sequence runs from the person to the institution to the numbers. Each step uses a public source, and each is explained in the sections that follow.

Check the doctor: MedReg, PsyReg and the specialist title

MedReg is the federal register of the university medical professions: doctors, dentists, pharmacists, chiropractors and veterinarians. Everyone in these professions who works in Switzerland must be entered, and the public part shows each person's GLN identifier, diploma, postgraduate titles and specialisations, languages, cantonal licences to practise on their own professional responsibility, any conditions or restrictions on those licences, and practice addresses. The Medical Professions Act names the register's purposes, and the first is the information and protection of patients (MedBG Art. 51).

Three details make it more useful than it first looks. The diploma type matters: MedReg distinguishes federal diplomas, recognised foreign ones (usually from EU or EFTA countries), diplomas declared equivalent, and verified diplomas of foreign doctors who may work here for up to 90 days per calendar year as notified service providers. Only a doctor with a federal or recognised diploma and a matching postgraduate title may practise on their own professional responsibility, and since 1 February 2020 every such doctor has needed a cantonal licence. And withdrawals or refusals of a licence are displayed, although, as the FOPH explains, the register cannot be searched for them as a list.

What MedReg does not show is equally instructive. Doctor and professor titles are academic qualifications awarded by universities; the FOPH notes that the law requires neither for practice, and the register does not record them. A professor's title tells you about an academic career, not about how often someone performs your operation.

The specialist title is the field that matters most. Swiss federal law recognises 45 specialist fields for doctors, each with five or six years of postgraduate training: six for surgery, cardiology, orthopaedic surgery and plastic, reconstructive and aesthetic surgery, five for general internal medicine (MedBV Annex 1). Additional qualifications, such as focus areas and certificates of competence, are private-law qualifications that the professional organisations may enter in MedReg voluntarily. The FMH's directory, doctorfmh.ch, which describes itself as the official list of doctors in Switzerland with more than 40,000 entries, lists them alongside the federal titles.

For psychotherapy, the equivalent register is PsyReg, public since 1 August 2017. It lists psychologists with federal or recognised titles in psychotherapy, child and adolescent psychology, clinical psychology, neuropsychology or health psychology, records for psychotherapists whether they are licensed to practise on their own responsibility, and holds restrictions and disciplinary measures for the cantons. Use it for any psychotherapist named in a mental health programme. Other health professions are listed in separate registers, GesReg and NAREG.

The same act sets professional duties that are fair questions for any doctor: to stay within the limits of their training, to keep up lifelong continuing education, to advertise only in ways that are objective and not misleading, to act independently of financial advantages when working with other professionals, and to carry professional liability insurance (MedBG Art. 40).

Check the institution: licence, hospital list and volume rules

Clinics operate under cantonal health law, and the rules differ by canton. In Zurich, for example, doctors who provide outpatient care in the name of a company need an operating licence from the Health Directorate. The simplest check is to ask the clinic which canton licenses it and to confirm with that canton's health department.

The hospital list is the more informative check. Under the Health Insurance Act, a hospital is admitted to treat inpatients at the expense of basic insurance if it provides adequate medical care, has the necessary specialist staff and suitable facilities, and appears on the canton's hospital list, which is divided by service mandates (KVG Art. 39). A hospital that is not on the list can be paid from basic insurance only under a contract with insurers, and then for no more than the insurers' share (KVG Art. 49a). Since 2011 the conference of cantonal health directors has recommended that cantons define those mandates with the service-group concept developed by Zurich: about 140 groups, each defined by diagnosis and procedure codes and each with its own requirements. The FOPH publishes a file of hospitals' membership of cantonal lists since 2008. Whatever your insurance, list status tells you that the canton has attached requirements to that particular service at that hospital.

For complex, highly specialised operations the cantons plan together. Since 1 January 2009 an intercantonal agreement on highly specialised medicine has replaced 26 cantonal plans with one national plan, and the resulting hospital list, in its version of 1 July 2026, takes precedence over the cantonal lists. Oesophagus, pancreas and liver resections have been allocated since 1 August 2019, deep rectal resection and complex bariatric surgery since 1 January 2024, each with requirements on experience, staff, infrastructure and processes. If your operation is on that list, ask whether the hospital is too.

Zurich goes one level further, to the surgeon. The canton sets minimum case numbers per surgeon for certain operations and publishes, by name and GLN, the surgeons who met them. Its list for 2026, version 2026.6, covers first and revision hip and knee replacements, spine surgery, radical prostatectomy and recognised breast centres, based on each surgeon's cases in 2023 and 2024. Zurich also inspects its listed hospitals, and since 2024 those hospitals have recorded whether a diagnosis was present on admission, which distinguishes a condition a patient arrived with from one that arose in hospital. Outside Zurich, ask the surgeon how many of your operation they performed last year, and compare the hospital's number in the FOPH data.

Check the numbers: FOPH quality indicators

The FOPH publishes the quality indicators of Swiss acute hospitals for every acute hospital, with data from 2008. They show case numbers, proportions such as the caesarean rate, mortality for selected conditions and procedures, lengths of stay, transfer rates and treatments subject to minimum case numbers, and their stated purpose includes allowing patients and referring doctors to choose a hospital on a factual basis. The eighteenth edition, the latest, covers 2024 and uses version 5.5 of the Swiss Inpatient Quality Indicators, grouped into 15 areas and 66 conditions and treatments.

Start with the case number. For many treatments it is a quality signal in itself, and it tells you how much weight the other figures can bear. For mortality, use the standardised mortality ratio, or SMR: observed deaths divided by the deaths expected from the patients' age and sex, with further risk factors for five indicators. An SMR above 1 means more deaths than expected. The query tool compares up to five hospitals on up to five indicators at once, and the case-number lists can be sorted and filtered by canton.

Two limits matter for private clinics in particular. A clinic that treats few inpatients for a condition will show small numbers, which is itself information about experience. And a clinic that works mainly on an outpatient or residential basis may have little to show in an acute-hospital dataset, which is a reason to use the next source as well. The FOPH's guidance on reading the indicators is worth reading first.

Check the outcomes: ANQ measurements

ANQ, the national association for quality development in hospitals and clinics, was founded in 2009. Its members are the hospitals' association H+, the insurers' associations, all 26 cantons and the Principality of Liechtenstein, and it coordinates uniform national quality measurements in acute care, rehabilitation and psychiatry. All Swiss hospitals and clinics have joined its national quality contract of 2011, all Swiss acute hospitals take part in its acute-care measurements, and results are risk-adjusted so that hospitals can be compared nationally.

The results portal works in three steps: choose the measurement, the year and the hospital. For acute care it covers surgical site infections, monitored with Swissnoso since 2010 after twelve surgical procedures in adults; unplanned readmissions since 2021; the national patient experience survey since 2025, after the earlier satisfaction survey of 2009 to 2023; falls and pressure ulcers since 2011; and the SIRIS implant registries, for hip and knee since 2012, the spine since 2021 and the shoulder from 2025.

Match the measurement to your treatment: for a knee replacement, the infection rate and the implant registry; for a rehabilitation stay or a psychiatric clinic, the measures ANQ runs separately for those fields. ANQ publishes its own notes on interpreting the results, and a single year's figure is best read alongside earlier years.

Accreditations and memberships: what they certify

A certificate confirms that a management system or a set of criteria was met when it was audited; it does not show that outcomes are better than elsewhere, and it is worth exactly as much as its verification. Ask for the certificate itself, note the issuing body and the expiry date, and check it with the issuer; a logo on a website is not evidence.

One Swiss certification body, SQS, the Swiss Association for Quality and Management Systems, lets anyone check online whether a named organisation holds one of its certificates, up to five queries a day, and the QR code on its certificates leads to the same check. The Swiss Leading Hospitals is an association of clinics with its own quality label: its members must hold ISO or EFQM certification and are assessed against the association's criteria, which cover clinical and patient-related standards as well as hotel services and infrastructure, by a neutral certification body rather than by the association itself. Its member list is published, and a label that includes hospitality by design answers a different question from the FOPH and ANQ data.

Some certifications carry legal weight. Swiss basic insurance, for example, links the surveillance of women with a moderately or strongly raised familial breast cancer risk to certified breast centres, such as those meeting the quality criteria of the Swiss Cancer League and the Swiss Society of Senology (KLV Art. 12d). International accreditations such as JCI should be checked the same way: with the accrediting body, not on the clinic's website.

Rankings: what Newsweek measures, and what it cannot

Newsweek's World's Best Hospitals, compiled with Statista, includes a Swiss list. The 2026 edition, published on 25 February 2026, scores hospitals on hospital quality metrics (40 per cent), peer recommendations (30 per cent national, 5 per cent international), patient experience (18.5 per cent) and the implementation of patient-reported outcome measures (6.5 per cent). In its Swiss list the university hospitals of Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne and Basel take the first four places, and Klinik Hirslanden in Zurich is fifth; our guide to the Hirslanden hospitals covers that group.

Read the weights before the order. Thirty-five per cent of the score comes from peer recommendations, a measure of reputation. The list includes only hospitals within the scope its method defines, so a specialised clinic's absence is not a verdict on it. And the FOPH, which publishes the national hospital quality indicators, states that a direct ranking of hospitals cannot usually be derived from its indicators. A ranking can help draw up a shortlist; it cannot tell you whether a particular surgeon performs your operation often.

When something goes wrong: complaints and ombudsman offices

Knowing where you would complain is part of vetting. The canton of Zurich's patient information sets out the sequence for hospitals in the canton: raise the problem with the staff or the hospital's management, and if that fails take it to a complaints office inside or outside the hospital. If a dispute about your rights, such as access to your records, cannot be settled, you can ask the hospital for a reasoned written decision. Decisions of cantonal hospitals can be appealed to the Health Directorate and those of other public hospitals to the district council; with a private hospital, the civil courts decide. Hospitals and self-employed doctors must carry liability insurance or provide equivalent security.

Other routes depend on the canton and the institution. In Geneva, the commission supervising the health professions and patients' rights oversees professionals and institutions under the cantonal health law and acts independently in disciplinary proceedings. Zurich's cantonal ombudsman, elected by the cantonal parliament, mediates problems with cantonal authorities and cantonal bodies. The Swiss Patient Organisation (SPO) advises on medical and dental treatment, with a free first telephone consultation, and set up PatBox.ch for reporting treatment experiences you are unsure about.

When the honest answer to a case is that treatment at home is the better route, our note on when Swiss treatment is not the answer explains the reasoning, and you can write to us with the outline of your situation.

About these sources

All sources were read on 22 September 2026. Registers are updated continuously, while quality data are published with a delay: the latest FOPH indicators describe 2024. Where a source exists only in German or French, the descriptions here are our translation.