Doctors concerned about negative online reviews are often best reaching out to the patient in private or simply ignoring the review, a lawyer has told a medicolegal congress.
Speaking in Sydney last week, Samantha Pillay from Barry Nilsson Lawyers warned that the scope for publishing defamatory material had expanded enormously with the rise of the internet and online review platforms.
However, pursuing legal action presented its own challenges.
“Often doing nothing can be the best course of action,” she told Informa’s Medico Legal Congress on Tuesday.
“Some reviews come across as irrational and ridiculous to most members of the public, and for these you can consider simply ignoring the review and hoping over time it fades into insignificance.
“Another option is to respond, either online by replying to the review or offline by contacting the patient directly if you can identify them… which is often what we recommend as a first port of call.”
When replying to a review publicly, she advised doctors to keep their responses prompt, professional and polite, and to take extra care in not breaching the patient’s privacy or confidentiality.
This could be tricky because even confirming the reviewer was a patient of the practice could potentially be a breach of privacy, she added.
For material that conveyed defamatory imputations or where the author could not be identified, doctors could try approaching the platform on which the content was posted and ask for it to be removed, although this was not always straightforward, she warned.
“Normally, Google and Meta [Facebook and Instagram] have terms of service that deal with certain types of content, things like explicit content or confidential information … but for defamation matters, Google has commented it doesn’t want to play judge or jury,” Ms Pillay said.
“So often, it will be reluctant to intervene unless there is a court order.”