The fine line between controlling and constructive

Moderation is a white-hot topic at Patient Opinion. We receive a couple of hundred stories a week and we want to do as little as possible to them before they're published.

There are of course elements (like abusive language or defamatory comments) that we have to strip out for legal or ethical reasons (see our editorial policy for more info), sometimes we make small changes just for clarity, but we always want to publish people's stories exactly as they were shared with us wherever we can. We also feel a duty to do justice to patients and their experiences and to help the NHS make the most of the insight that is shared with them. Sometimes this means stepping in with a slightly firmer hand and advising people on both sides. We hope that mostly we get this right and that our intervention is useful but we're always very open to being told otherwise. We have learnt an incredible amount in the last 7 years but we're still learning, every day and story by story.

There is an increasing interest in moderation, both ours and elsewhere on the web. As forums, blogs, news websites and social media now dominate the field of public comment and are a major source of information on which we base our opinions, people are questioning how paternalistic moderation needs to be. At Patient Opinion, we welcome this debate (as if our moderation meetings weren't passionate enough already!). We're just about to move into a brand new space with our expansion into adult social care and so the topic of how to moderate stories, keep everyone safe, maintain a constructive dialogue between staff and service users and ultimately prevent information governance bogging us all down will rage on and our policy will no doubt evolve dramatically.

We've been digesting this great blog on moderation from Charlie Beckett for The London School of Economics and Political Science. It presents research by Sanna Trygg, a visiting research fellow at Journalistfonden, who explored the difference between moderation in her home country and the UK. For those interested, it opens up the discussion about online moderation and while it's mainly looking at news sites, it does surface some of the related issues that we tussle with at Patient Opinion.

As difficult as it is to get right, moderation is vital. Maybe we're still intervening too much, but we do know that if we didn't nurture the conversation between patients and the NHS there would be a much higher risk of both patients and staff feeling vulnerable and demoralised which couldn't be further from what everyone wants. We believe stories should be authentic, honest and personal and we do our best to make sure that we handle them with care. At upwards of 40,000 stories, thousands of responses and hundreds of service improvements we think that we, and all the people that contribute to Patient Opinion, are moving in the right direction.