Social Media Policy

 

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At The Wells Medical Practice 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 individualised 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 surgery team.

If you have a complaint about our service we encourage you to report this using our complaints procedures, where the practice will investigates and respond.

The GP 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 libellous 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.