Gaming, trolls and other web nasties

People quite often ask us what we would do about people who make up false reviews. perhaps a hospital is painting itself in an overly-positive light. Or sending us falsely negative reviews of competitors for that matter.

It’s a good question because both certainly occur on review sites like Amazon or Tripadvisor.( In fact a couple of North American review sites have been reduced to rubble when it was discovered they were making money by first putting up bad reviews and then charging brands to take them down.)  So it’s a question we take seriously here at Patient Opinion and watch out for pretty carefully.

Happily such ‘gaming’  by providers is been extremely rare on Patient Opinion but it’s important to keep it that way so we thought you might like to know what we can do when our internal checks suggests that a service or a patient seems to be making stuff up.

Like so much on Patient Opinion the first line of defence is transparency.  So, if we suspected that a provider was adding false reviews we would contact them and discuss the possibility. This alone would give them pause for thought. If there was clear proof of manipulation then simply stating that we reserve the right to highlight our suspicions on their main Patient Opinion landing page acts as an even stronger deterrent.

Sometimes of course services contact us to say that they think a posting is from someone with an axe to grind. Again our view is pretty straightforward – every voice matters even if in the opinion of some that voice is an out and out rant. So providing the story meets our editorial policy, up it goes. But what we don’t allow is repeated stories about the same issue. So if you are a trust and you feel that we have published what to you is a ‘rant’ then rest assured that you won’t see multiple, nearly identical stories. And the best response of all to what a trust may perceive as a ‘rant’ lies in their own hands. After all a response that begins ‘We suspect that we have been in touch with you many times about this issue….’ immediately tells the general reader that there are at least two sides to the story.  Services also sometimes ask how we ensure that people are telling the truth, not merely making things up!  We operate on a basis of trust.  When someone shares their story they sign to say that they are telling the truth and we believe them!   We don’t check that what they’ve said is factually correct. Theirperception is their reality and that’s what we need to deal with.

But policing organisations is very much a last resort for us. What we really want to do is to simply be a place that helps people – patients and staff in the NHS - to improve services. So the real answer to the gaming problem is that critical stories and how providers respond to them are actually much more important than positive stories.

Later this year we will be publishing rankings for all providers showing not only how often they respond but also how many service improvements they have made. To get to the top of this league table health services need to first get lots of meaty stories and then make lots of great changes. Just posting made up stories saying how great they are will rightly leave them trailing in the dust of the good guys.