Social media 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 all the content you post, including any content that you choose to share
• we will remove, in whole or in part, or ignore posts that we feel are inappropriate
• we will report and remove any social media profiles that are set up using our Trust’s name and/or imagery 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, marital 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 if we do, we hope you understand the reasons.

Comments made on our social media accounts will not affect or influence the treatment, care or other services we provide to individuals, unless the behaviours also trigger the requirements of our Managing Violence and Aggression policy.

Responding

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

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 and messages 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 Mid and South Essex 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:

• Adding image descriptions to photos on social platforms
• Using CamelCase in hashtags to ensure that screen readers interpret hashtags correctly
• Adding subtitles to 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

If 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 mse.communications@nhs.net and/or send a message through the relevant social media channel.