NHS Dental Practice Reviews to be Moderated
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- Published: Monday, 15 April 2024 09:55
- Written by Peter Ingle
- Hits: 1463
The Wild West days of dental internet reviews may be coming to an end. For some years dental teams have had minimal right of reply to reviews that were factually incorrect.
The general advice in terms of a damage limitation strategy was to try and bury bad reviews under a batch of positive ones. While moderately effective, this rankled when in some cases the episode described had never even taken place, but the damaging review would remain live.
Now there is some positive news from the NHS ratings and reviews team. The result of a two year long development process, a new AI driven system has now gone live. All reviews submitted to the NHS website will be checked by AI. Those that pass all of the auto moderation-rules will be published. Those rules are based on NHS rating and reviews policy.
This policy is set out on the page where reviews are submitted and states that comments will not be published that contain:
- Names of individuals, mention of gender or identifying features
- Offensive, abusive or inappropriate language or remark
- Any review where your experience has resulted in a formal complaint or you intend to make a formal complaint
- Mentioning methods of self-harm or suicide, or mentioning plans to harm yourself or end your life
- Reviews must also be about a specific experience and not a general view of the NHS or the service as a whole.
As it stands the AI system will identify, names, reviews that do not describe a specific experience, serious complaints, and safeguarding issues. The intention is that such reviews will not be published.
While the system is in its early days of operation the NHS team say that initial results are good and that they will be monitoring the system very closely. Importantly, they are appealing to practices to help them with this by reporting any reviews that they feel have broken the NHS ratings and reviews policy.
The NHS team point out that they do not reject reviews where there is disagreement about facts, and say that their policy is to remain impartial. They state that, “it is not possible to determine what happened or who is right about their experience.” However should those being reviewed feel that a published review breaks the site policy they should report it using the unsuitable button under each review.
GDPUK readers are advised to remain vigilant. A brief inspection of the review site at the time of writing, quickly led to a six day old one star review of a GP practice that named a staff member.
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