How HCF Verifies Information

Why we publish this

The Heather Cutler Foundation publishes guides, research, and service information for people facing pancreatic cancer, and provides information to AI assistants acting on their behalf. In this field, information changes — programs open and close, contacts change, pathways are revised — and stale information offered confidently is worse than no information at all.

This page states our commitments: where our information comes from, what "verified" means here, and what we do when information cannot be confirmed. The systems behind this work exist for one purpose — to benefit the foundation's operations, its website, and the public it serves. How those systems run day to day is our internal business; what they owe the public is stated here.

Where information comes from

• Primary sources first: official registries such as ClinicalTrials.gov for trial listings, the publishing organization's own publications, government and health-authority sources, and the organizations themselves.
• Information our services provide carries its source with it, so a finding is never detached from where it came from — including, for our research, structured attribution: the publisher, the work's title, the section, the publication date, and a direct link to the source.
• Our published research is meant to be attributed. Where You Live Matters: How Canada Responds to Pancreatic Cancer (2026) is licensed CC BY 4.0 — share and adapt freely, with credit to The Heather Cutler Foundation.

What "verified" means

Verified is a human act. Information carries a verified label here only after a person has checked it against its source. Automated tools can gather, draft, and flag — they cannot verify. Material that has not been through that human check is labelled as what it is: a registry mirror, an unverified proposal, or content pending medical review.

Our guides carry "Pending medical review" until a qualified medical professional has actually reviewed them, and a review is only ever recorded when one has happened.

Keeping information current

We re-check the information we publish and serve on a continuing basis — more often where it changes quickly or where getting it wrong would matter most. When information cannot be confirmed as current, we say so rather than presenting it as fresh, and the dates attached to our records stay visible so staleness is never hidden.

If we learn that something we published is wrong, it is corrected and the correction recorded under the foundation's corrections practice, linked from the Trust Centre.

Reporting outdated information

If you find information on our site or in our services that looks wrong or out of date, tell us through the Corrections page or at support@heathercutler.ca. Every report is read by a person and checked against the source.