The Nepal Medical Council code binds your doctors, not your company
Draw this line before a single page gets written: the Nepal Medical Council Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct 2017 binds registered doctors. It does not bind your hospital company.
The code says so itself, opening with a code “which all doctors registered under it, are to abide by”. Its violations are written as obligations on a medical practitioner, and the Council’s register reaches individuals. Your hospital as a legal entity sits elsewhere: under the Public Health Service Act 2075 and Regulation 2077.
That sounds like good news for a marketing manager. It is not, quite. Every consultant whose name, photograph, qualifications and specialty you publish is personally bound, so when marketing writes the page, the doctor carries the exposure.
So anything naming a practitioner needs that practitioner’s sign-off. A real read-through, not a formality.
Is the 2017 code still the current one?
Worth asking, because Nepal replaced the parent statute. The 2017 code cites the Nepal Medical Council Act 1964; the Council now lists an Act 2020 and a Regulation 2024.
I could not settle it from the Council’s own guidelines page. Requested without JavaScript, it returns an empty <div class="doc-list"></div> — the listing is painted in by script, so there is nothing in the HTML to read. The same failure this article is about, on the regulator’s own site.
So my claim is narrow: the full 2017 text sits on the Ministry of Health and Population’s portal as a downloadable PDF, and I found no successor. That is my search coming up empty, not proof none exists. Ask the Council if a decision turns on it.
What the code lets a practice website say
Section 5 does not read like a marketing guideline. It opens: “Advertising is against the code of ethics except in the manner set out below”, then narrows — a practitioner “may provide information about his professional services to the public only in the following ways”.
Only. The permitted channels are three: signboards, announcements in mass media, and practice websites. Permission is enumerated, not general.
Clause 5.C is short enough to quote whole:
A medical practitioner may publish his professional service information in either his practice website or the website of medical practice group. The website may carry only the service information which is permitted by the council.
It adds that a practitioner should not post medical activities on social media “with an intent of procuring patients or with a sense of self-grandiosity”.
Section 3.C goes further: soliciting patients, directly or indirectly, by practitioners or organisations is called unethical. It also lists what a practitioner is expected to make public, and inform the Council of: starting of practice, change of type of practice, change of address, temporary absence and cover of duties, resumption of another practice, succeeding to another practice.
A service-information list, not a campaign brief.
The four-week clock nobody mentions
Clause 5.B permits mass-media announcements of a new practice or altered conditions — a change of address, a new partnership — but requires that “such announcements should be completed within four weeks of commencement or changed conditions of practice”.
So a branch opening puts the announcement coverage and launch PR inside a four-week window. Plan it before the ribbon is cut.
Patients search doctor names, and your doctor pages may be invisible
On 12 August 2026 I pulled a desktop results page for Nepal for “best cardiologist in kathmandu”. Counting every block from the top — map pack, then organic — four of the first ten were built around individual doctors rather than institutions: drbinay.com.np in the map pack beside Shahid Gangalal National Heart Centre and the National Cardiac Centre; HAMS Hospital’s profile page for Dr Deewakar Sharma at sixth; doctorofheart.com and drsatishkumarsingh.com.np at ninth and tenth.
Nepal Mediciti’s cardiology department page came eleventh, below a rival hospital’s page about one named doctor. Rankings move — check it yourself.
In Nepali healthcare search the named practitioner is the ranking asset. The department page is not.
Now the technical half. The same day I requested doctor-listing pages from several Kathmandu hospitals the way a crawler sees them, without executing JavaScript.
Grande International Hospital returned its doctors inside the HTML — over a hundred names, readable by anything that fetches the page. Nepal Mediciti’s doctors URL returned a 2,858-byte shell: an empty <div id="root">, three script tags of which two are analytics, and the title “Nepal Mediciti — Best Hospital in Nepal | NABH International Accredited”. No doctor names. A comment there records that per-page titles are set after load, so that title is the default every route ships.
Both are serious hospitals. One is discoverable by name. The other asks Google to run an application before it can learn which cardiologists work there.
A profile page that ranks and still passes the code
Clause 5.A sets out the only information a signboard or visiting card may carry. It maps almost exactly onto a profile page, which makes it the safest template available:
- Name of the practitioner with the prefix Dr. and any academic designations
- Name of the practice
- Quotable qualifications approved by the Council, in the approved abbreviations
- Specialist title approved by the Council
- Nepal Medical Council registration number
- Name and logo of the associated medical institution or institutions
- Consultation hours
- Indication of the location of the practice in the building
Publish the registration number. The code already makes it a mandatory identifier: a practitioner should sign every prescription and mention their name and Nepal Medical Council registration number, and failing to do so is stated to be professional misconduct.
Then link it to the Council’s Find Registered Doctor search, whose three fields are Full Name, NMC No and Degree — free verification on the regulator’s own domain. Consultation hours and practice location add local relevance in the same block.
Testimonials, before-and-after galleries and review requests
Most healthcare SEO advice recommends patient stories, before-and-after imagery and treatment case studies. In Nepal all three run into a clause that is not optional.
A practitioner should “maintain the secrecy and confidentiality of a patient’s information and all data obtained in course of investigation and treatment”, and such information “should not be disclosed to a third party without prior consent of the patient”. Confidential records are to be kept at least five years from the last visit.
Consent is the hinge: written, specific, obtained for publication — not a treatment consent form stretched to cover marketing. A clinical photograph is data obtained during treatment, so publishing it is disclosure.
Review requests are murkier, and I would rather flag the tension than pretend it is settled. Clause 5.D says practitioners’ services “may not be promoted by means of unsolicited visits, telephone calls, fax, e-mails or leaflets or persons acting on their behalf”. Automated post-visit SMS and email campaigns are that shape exactly. I found no Council guidance applying 5.D to review requests, so treat it as unresolved.
The conservative route works anyway: ask at discharge, in person, with a card or a QR code the patient chooses to scan. Solicited, better converting than a blast, and it keeps the practitioner out of the argument. Profile mechanics are in my Google Business Profile guide.
Superlative title tags are a compliance problem
Superlatives are the house style in Nepali healthcare search. In the cardiologist pull above, ranking titles included “National Cardiac Centre : Best Heart Clinic in Kathmandu, Nepal” and “Best Cardiologist in Nepal: Dr Ashok Paudel”, and a Norvic Hospital result sat on the path /best-cardiac-treatment-in-kathmandu-nepal/. They sit badly against two clauses.
Section 3.C calls self-advertisement incompatible with the principles of medical ethics and potentially misleading, noting that a practitioner successful at achieving publicity may not be the most appropriate one to consult. The code separately requires information given to the public through media to “comply with the principles of accuracy and objectivity” and not be “exaggerated or misleading”.
“Best cardiologist in Nepal” in a title tag is a claim of fact you cannot evidence. It is also a weak ranking play, because that query returns a map pack.
Which points at the architecture that does work. Nepali specialist demand breaks down by city: Google’s autocomplete expands “best cardiologist in” to Kathmandu, Pokhara, Butwal, Biratnagar, Nepalgunj, Chitwan, Dhangadhi and Birgunj. Departments in more than one city give you your page structure — specialty by location, each page factual. I have written separately about the Kathmandu local pack.
One caution on keyword research. “Hospital SEO Kathmandu” looks like a marketing query, but the same day’s pull returned a map pack of actual hospitals, Mero and Swacon International among them. A facility type plus a city usually means patients seeking care, not managers seeking a consultant.
HIPAA does not apply in Nepal
You will see HIPAA compliance promised in Nepali healthcare marketing copy. HIPAA is United States legislation. It has no application to a hospital in Lalitpur unless you handle protected health information for a US covered entity — a US insurer or provider, say.
Nepal’s instrument is the Privacy Act 2075 (2018), listed among health-sector legislation by the Ministry of Health and Population. Where the acronym appears on a Nepali hospital site it usually means the template came from elsewhere; the fix is to name the law that does apply.
There is a practical edge for analytics: appointment forms, symptom-checker interactions and department-level URLs push clinical detail into third-party tools. Decide deliberately what you send.
Check which council registers your practitioner
Not everyone with a clinical title is an NMC registrant, and this decides which number belongs on a profile and which register you link to.
The Nepal Medical Council registers medical practitioners — the code binds “all doctors registered under it”. The Nepal Health Professional Council, established under its Act 2053, describes its remit as registering health professionals “other than Medical Doctors, Nurses, Pharmacists, and Ayurveda” — those three sitting with the Nepal Nursing Council, the Nepal Pharmacy Council and the Nepal Ayurvedic Medical Council.
Confirm the register before you publish a number. It also decides who may be presented as “Dr.” on your site.
Frequently asked questions
Where I would start
If I picked up a Nepali hospital site tomorrow, I would work in this order:
- View source on the doctor directory. If crawlers cannot read the names, nothing else matters yet.
- Give every consultant a real URL built on the clause 5.A field list, with the NMC number and a link to the Council register.
- Strip superlatives from title tags; use specialty, city and facility instead.
- Audit every testimonial and clinical image for documented consent to publish.
- Replace HIPAA language with the Privacy Act 2075, and review what analytics collects on clinical pages.
None of that is a link-building campaign. It is groundwork, and cheap next to a redesign. For what gets built and in what order, that is my healthcare SEO service.
One caveat, plainly: I am an SEO consultant, not a lawyer. Read the code yourself, and have your medical director approve anything naming a practitioner.