Posting about Community Contacts
Why these listings need a little extra care
Community Contacts are different from the businesses in our Local Businesses directory. A school, GP surgery or police station can't choose their customer the way a cafe can — they have a duty to serve everyone, and the people working there are usually doing a hard job inside a system they don't control. So when we talk about them in public, we aim a notch higher than we would in a pub conversation.
The guidance below is on top of, not instead of, our main community guidelines. Everything in those still applies.
Write about the service, not the people
The most useful thing you can share is what the experience was like — how easy it was to get an appointment, whether the building is welcoming, whether phones get answered, how the service handled something tricky. That's the kind of qualitative detail Ofsted and CQC reports don't capture, and it's the gap Lincoln.Life fills.
What you'll want to avoid is making it about a particular person. A receptionist having a bad morning, a GP who came across as curt, a teacher you didn't get on with — those are real frustrations but they don't belong on a public listing where the named individual can't reply.
Things we'll quietly remove
A post that does any of the following will be replaced with a short notice, the same way we handle anything else that crosses a line in the main guidelines:
Naming individual staff
No "Doctor X was rude", "PC Smith ignored me", "Mrs Jones shouldn't be teaching Year 4". This applies whether the post is critical or praising — "Receptionist Sarah is wonderful" gets the same treatment, because once we allow names in one direction we can't hold the line in the other. Talk about the practice, the school, the station instead.
Clinical or case-specific details
Don't describe a diagnosis, treatment, examination or consultation in detail. This is for two reasons: clinicians can't respond publicly without breaching confidentiality, and the specifics often identify the patient even if the post doesn't name them. Same logic applies to legal cases, school disciplinary matters, and police investigations.
Case-specific grievances
"I waited four months for an MRI and they lost the referral twice" is a grievance about your case — legitimate, but the listing page can't resolve it. Use the formal complaints process for that (PALS for NHS, the council's complaints page, the school's governing body, the IOPC for police). Comments here work best when they describe a pattern other people might recognise, not a one-off you're still in the middle of.
Good comments and not-quite comments
Good
- "Phones are answered quickly first thing in the morning, slower after about ten."
- "The reception area is on the ground floor with step-free access from the car park."
- "The walk-in clinic on a Saturday morning has been reliable for our family for years."
- "They run a really good Christmas Eve children's service that's worth turning up early for."
Not quite right — would be removed
- "Dr Patel is brilliant" — names an individual.
- "They prescribed me amitriptyline for my back pain and it didn't help" — clinical specifics.
- "They rejected my planning application three times for no reason" — case-specific grievance.
- "The new vicar is much friendlier than the last one" — comparison of named individuals.
Why we draw the line here
Community Contacts work as a public utility — somewhere your neighbours can find a school's number, the council's email, or check whether a dentist is taking new NHS patients. For that to stay useful and trusted, the comments under each listing need to be the kind of thing the listed organisation could read without flinching, even if the comments are critical.
We're not trying to silence honest feedback. We're trying to keep this corner of Lincoln.Life as something the wider city can rely on, including the people who run the services being talked about.