"Care Opinion."

Dear Wisteria

Thank you for getting in touch. My name is Sarah and I am one of the senior moderators at Care Opinion. We published your feedback about us on our website so we can reply publicly to you. We encourage Health and Care services to be open and transparent with feedback, so it is important that we are too.

Firstly, I want to thank you for your kind words about Care Opinion as a platform. We are a small but committed team and it means a lot to us when people tell us they like what we are doing.

I also wanted to address your comments about our moderating. I am sorry that when we removed the dates from your story that it confused the timeline of events. We remove dates from stories to protect the identities of patients and staff. All feedback should be anonymous and we also do not want staff to be identified negatively. This is written in our moderation principles that we display on the site and, in our moderation policy and guidelines for moderators. Our aim is to always ensue the original meaning in a story and I sorry this was not the case in this instance.

When we email story tellers about their story we say “If we can, we publish your story just as you wrote it. Sometimes we have to edit stories a little bit so that we can publish them. We explain why we sometimes do this in our moderation principles”. We include a link to the moderation principles.

This means we only email people if we have to make very large edits to stories. We don’t usually consider removing dates from stories to be large edit,as we hope we can do this easily without affecting the meaning of the story.

I would like to suggest a couple of options that could hopefully put this situation right for you:

1: I can add a reply to your original story to say we had to remove some dates. The NHS organisation and public site users will be able to see this. Or…

2: if you would like to suggest an edited version of your story without the dates, that you are happy with we can upload this instead.

If you would like to do the second option you can email me your preferred version at info@careopinion.org.uk and address it to “Sarah”.

Thinking more generally about your feedback and how we can continue to improve on the services we provide, I will raise your comments at our monthly moderation meeting. The next meeting is at the start of August. This will allow us the space as a team to think about how we can better moderate people’s stories, and how we can keep them properly informed about what we need to do to be able to display their stories on Care Opinion.

I hope my reply goes someway to resolving the issues you have with us and thank you for advocating for other story tellers.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Sarah