NHS trust takes down online reviews

The NHS has had to remove nearly all of the 653 online patient reviews of a healthcare trust after a BBC investigation found the system was open to abuse.

Newsnight found during 2013 49 percent of patient reviews about Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust on NHS Choices had been posted by staff accounts and 47 percent of these staff accounts did not declare a conflict of interest.

Often staff would simply help patients to post reviews but despite this, the trust acknowledged it should have been clearer when identifying the writer of the review.

Although, the reviews were originally posted to independent feedback website Patient Opinion, they are syndicated to appear on the NHS Choices website. Here, any identifier of a staff poster is automatically stripped.

A spokesman for Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust said: "We have created a public website so that anyone can see what is being said about our services because we want to be open and honest about the feedback we receive."