The National Institute of Medical Herbalists is the UK's leading professional body representing herbal practitioners. The Institute is self-regulating and is run on a voluntary basis.The Institute maintains a register of individual members, sets the profession's educational standards and runs an accreditation system for training establishments, maintains mandatory programmes of professional development, provides codes of conduct, ethics and practise, has a complaints mechanism and disciplinary procedures, requires members to have professional indemnity insurance, represents the profession, patients and the public through participation in external processes such as regulation of the profession and herbal medicine.