At West Town Surgery we appreciate some people may choose to air their concerns regarding services on social media.
Our experience is that, comments posted on social media can be of a negative nature and attract all manner of further negative responses - often becoming individualized comments rather than constructive feedback about the Surgery.
We welcome all feedback - positive and negative as it gives us the opportunity to review the services we provide and, where necessary, make changes or improvements
We have noticed a developing trend where a patient will use a Social Media site such as Facebook to comment on the Practice and members of the surgery staff.
We would ask that if you have a complaint about our service we encourage you to report this to the practice manager using our complaints procedures. The practice always investigates and responds to complaints.
The partners reserve the right to remove a patient from the surgery list and report them to the social networking site if they are found to have made libelous statements or defamatory comments about the surgery or a member of the surgery staff. The legal definition of defamation is:
"any intentionally false communication, either written or spoken, that harms a person’s reputation; decreases the respect, regard, or confidence in which a person is held; or induces disparaging, hostile or disagreeable opinions or feelings against a person."
Ethical Social Networking
The GMC's guidance, Doctors' use of social media states that social media sites should never be used to discuss individual patients or their care. If a GP is contacted by a patient through their private profile for medical advice the patient will be asked to direct their query to the surgery.
You would not expect to read derogatory comments about yourself online and neither do we.