IwantGreatCare.org – “rate your doctor” – will it go up in flames of libel?
IwantGreatCare.org was launched in the UK as a service allowing patients to rate their doctors online. Patients can rate doctors out of 100 on "trust", "listening" and recommended categories, and then leave comments about the doctors that they have rated.
Every time I consult to website owners about user generated content, one of the first points I assess risk on is libel. Some of the key questions are:
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a. How risky is the subject matter and how likely is it to land you in court for libel.
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b. What sort of mechanisms do you have to remove libel promptly (and how prompt is 'promptly').
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c. What sort of defences do you have in law if you are taken to court.
When the subject matter is people in a service profession, especially as personal as healthcare, libel is all but inevitable. Emotions tend to run high, and commentary becomes heated and very personal.
My experience also shows that people who are happy with a service are much less likely to comment on it online compared to those who are aggrieved or unhappy. Although some patients might go online to defend their GP, it is those with a grudge or misgiving who will carry the site, and it is often bad reviews that get the most focus.
To complicate things further, the kind of anonymity offered by IwantGreatCare.org produces a mistrust effect. When you see a good review, you wonder if it is real or produced by allies (or the practitioner themselves) to defend a reputation. When a bad review appears, it could well be a disgruntled colleague, not just a patient.
The risk is higher in the case of IwantGreatCare.org, because not only does it allow you to rate your doctor numerically, but it also lets you leave a comment. This is where patients and upset relatives will vent, like the example I found on the site for a certain doctor (whom I shall not name): "I went to see the doctor on behalf of my mother who is schizophrenic. He refused to listen to the issues i needed to discuss and was very very patronising and arrogant. I am not stupid - i have a doctorate in science and have published in many scientific journals - yet i was not listened to and the arrogance of Dr (Name) was unbelievable. He actually left me in tears as I left the surgery. I would recommend that anyone needing healthcare in (Place name) avoid him at all costs." If it were just numbers, perhaps it would have made it a little easier to defend in a libel case, but words to this effect cannot be taken back easily.
Then there is the question of prompt removal of libel, and how effective it is. I suspect that someone advised IwantGreatCare.org that they have a defence in law because they are not a publisher, as long as they remove content reported to them promptly. This may be the case when you run an online forum or community, but based on conversations with some of the most experienced libel lawyers in the country, I am not convinced that this argument would protect IwantGreatCare.org in court. The facts of the matter are:
- The site invites very specific content - the rating of doctors. It doesn't open a wide avenue of discussions, it isn't a general debate about doctors - it is inviting praise or criticism. A judge may well see this as implying responsibility for the content.
- a site run by "a small team", as IwantGreatCare.org describes itself, does not have the resource for immediate removal of reported content. Again, they may have been advised that "a reasonable time" for removal of content is not defined in law and that some legal experts suggest 72 hours, but in fact, and bearing in mind the point above about the kind of content invited, by the time a piece of content is removed, it may be too late to completely eradicate it from the Internet. The comment about Dr X that I quoted above has since been removed from the site, but still lives in Google's cache. If it is quoted by other sites and related to IwantGreatCare.org, then it will have left the control of the site, and the extent of the libel will have increased significantly. Even if removed, the originator would still be where it started, and I doubt if best efforts would defend the site from responsibility.
The IwantGreatCare.org is still in beta, and is already creating a storm of outrage within the medical profession. If it actually makes it to a full launch and gains some traction, I would not be surprised if it had to defend a libel case within its first 18 months.
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