The Communications Team at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) is responsible for several different social media accounts on a number of platforms.
We are present on the following channels: Facebook (including a closed staff group), Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Vimeo.
These guidelines are in place 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 CUH.
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 routinely passed onto colleagues in relevant hospital departments, as well as the Patient Advice and Liaison Service.
We may use your contact information/ usernames to respond to messages/ comments you send to us. If you post publicly on social media, we may share/ retweet your post with our followers.
You may unsubscribe/ 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 about Covid-19 or the Covid-19 vaccine
- we will report and remove any social media profiles that are set up using CUH 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, 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 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 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 the Cambridge University 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:
- 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
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 the CUH communications team via email and / or the relevant social media channel.