Review guidelines
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Reviews help families choose care. Families, patients, and friends with first-hand experience can review a facility once. Our team reads every review before it is published and checks it only against the rules below. Positive and negative reviews follow exactly the same rules.
We never remove a review because
- It is negative, critical, or harshly worded.
- It has a low star rating.
- The facility disagrees with it, or asks us to take it down.
- The facility has claimed its listing, pays us for anything, or advertises with us.
- It describes care the reviewer believes was poor, unsafe, or neglectful.
Negative reviews are welcome. Every rule below applies the same way to positive and negative reviews.
The rules
We don’t publish a review, or we take it down, only when it breaks one of these rules, and we always tell its author which one.
Private health information
Don't share health details that could identify a person: no names together with diagnoses, room numbers, dates of birth, or similar details about any resident or patient, including your own family member.
What’s fine: Describing your family's experience in general terms is fine, for example "my father needed wound care after surgery".
Names of staff, residents, or patients
Don't name individual staff members, residents, or patients, whether you are praising or criticizing them. Refer to roles instead.
What’s fine: Roles are fine, for example "the night nurse", "the physical therapist", "the administrator".
Threats, harassment, or hate
Don't threaten, harass, or demean anyone, and don't use slurs or attack people for their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, or other personal traits. No sexually explicit content.
What’s fine: Strong criticism of the care, the services, or how the facility is run is fine, however harsh.
Spam or advertising
Don't advertise, solicit, or post links, phone numbers, email addresses, or the same text more than once.
What’s fine: Mentioning that you called the facility or visited its website is fine.
Conflict of interest
Don't review a facility you work for, used to work for, own, manage, or compete with, and don't review in exchange for anything (payment, a discount, a gift, or a prize), whether the review is positive or negative.
What’s fine: Patients, residents, family members, and friends with first-hand experience of the facility are welcome.
Not a genuine experience
Only review a facility you or your family actually used or visited. Don't write a review for someone else, use more than one account, or describe an experience that didn't happen.
What’s fine: You may write about care your loved one received, as long as you saw it or were closely involved.
Not about this facility
A review must be about this facility. We don't publish reviews that are about a different facility, or that are entirely about something else, such as politics, a news story, or insurance and government policy in general.
What’s fine: Billing, admissions, discharge, food, cleanliness, staffing, communication, and therapy at this facility are all on topic, even in a review that also mentions other things.
Illegal content
Don't post anything that breaks the law, such as other people's private information, text copied from somewhere else without permission, or anything that promotes illegal activity.
What’s fine: Describing a problem you reported to an inspector or ombudsman is fine.
How moderation works
- Every review and every edit is read by our team before it appears. Most are published within a few days.
- If a review breaks a rule, we tell the author which rule, and they can edit it and send it again.
- If you edit a published review, the published version stays up until we have read your edit.
- Anyone signed in can report a published review that breaks a rule. A report alone never removes a review: our team checks it against the same rules.
- Our team members never decide on their own reviews, or on reviews of a facility they are connected to.
For facilities
- A facility can reply to each review once, publicly. Replies follow the same rules and are read by our team before they appear.
- A facility can't edit, hide, or remove reviews, and claiming a listing or paying for anything never changes which reviews appear or in what order.
- A facility can report a review that breaks a rule, like anyone else.
- Facility staff, owners, and competitors can't review the facility.
What every reviewer confirms
This review is about my own or my family's real experience with this facility. I don't work for, own, or compete with it, and nobody offered me anything for writing it.
The review score is the average of the published reviews on LocalCareProvider. Google ratings are shown separately and never mixed into it.