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Social media house rules

Our Communications Team is responsible for our social media accounts on several different platforms.

We are present on the following channels: Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Threads.

These guidelines have been created to help create an environment where our community can engage and are free to make comments, ask questions and share their experiences of our services on all social media channels run by Gloucestershire Hospitals.

We are always interested in hearing from you and ask if you use our channels please show courtesy, kindness and respect for all other members.

How we use social media

If you follow us on social media, we do not automatically follow back. Being followed, using hashtags or mentioning other accounts does not imply endorsement of any kind.

We will retweet or share where we think it is useful or interesting but, again, this is not an endorsement.

We update and monitor our social media accounts during normal office hours, Monday to Friday. Social media platforms may occasionally be unavailable and we accept no responsibility for our lack of service due to any downtime.

Views and feedback

We welcome feedback, ideas and engagement and will try to join the conversation where possible, and where it is right to do so.

Compliments, complaints and emerging themes are regularly passed onto colleagues in relevant hospital departments, as well as the Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS).

We may use your contact information/ usernames to respond to messages or comments you send to us. If you post publicly on social media, we may share or retweet your post with our followers.

You may unsubscribe or unfollow us at any stage.

Our House Rules

By engaging with our social media channels you agree to follow these guidelines:

  • all users must comply with the social media platform’s terms of use, as well as these terms of use
  • you are wholly responsible for any content you post, including content that you choose to share
  • we will remove, in whole or in part, or ignore posts that we feel are inappropriate
  • we will delete comments and block accounts spreading false information
  • we will report and remove any social media profiles that are set up using imagery that belongs to us without permission

We will remove, block, ban and/ or report users to the associated social media platform who direct messages at us which we believe:

  • bully, harass or intimidate any individual or organisation
  • are unlawful, libellous, defamatory, abusive, threatening, harmful, obscene, profane
  • promote discrimination based on the protected characteristics; age, disability, gender, martial status, pregnancy, race, religion and sexual orientation
  • are deceptive or misleading
  • infringe or violate someone else's rights
  • violate the law
  • violate any intellectual property rights
  • discuss on-going legal proceedings
  • are spam (persistent negative and/ or abusive tweeting in which the aim is to provoke a response)
  • advertise products or services
  • are irrelevant or off-topic
  • are disruptive
  • are repetitive

We will also remove, block, report or ban any user who:

  • encourages others to post such messages
  • uses offensive images as their profile picture
  • has an offensive user name

Hopefully we will not have to do this, but we hope you understand the reasons.

Responding

We’ll do our best to respond to your enquiries during the working day.

We’ll try to help you, or direct you to people and/or departments who can, wherever possible.

Our working hours are 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday. We’ll deal with enquiries sent outside of this time as soon as possible when working hours resume.

We do not respond to messages of a commercial nature.

It is important to note that all comments and postings by followers on this site ("User Content") do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

When comments and queries posted outside of working hours on Twitter and Facebook represent a risk to patient safety or a serious risk to the Trust’s reputation, the Communications manager on-call will respond.

We reserve the right to modify or change these house rules at any time.

Accessibility

We aim to make our social media as accessible as possible for our communities, and there are a number of ways we do this, including adding subtitles to all our videos.

Privacy

We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We may use analytics or third parties to analyse our social media channels for trends, insights and engagement.

What to do if you see something that doesn’t look right

Should you spot any content or comments posted on our social media channels which you believe are not in accordance with these house rules, please report it to ghn-tr.comms@nhs.net and / or the relevant social media channel.

This statement was prepared on 15 August 2023. It was last reviewed on 30 August 2023

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