How to write a review worth reading

Never name a member of staff, and never describe one closely enough to be named. No names, no nicknames, no “the tall surgeon on the Tuesday list”, no “the new registrar in paediatrics”. A department can be criticised as sharply as you like. A department cannot lose its job, be harassed at work, or be threatened over something written here. A person can.

There is nearly always an institutional way to say the same thing, and it is the more useful sentence anyway. Instead of “the consultant ignored us all afternoon”, write “students were regularly left on the ward with no supervising doctor after four”. The second version describes something the next student will also run into, and something the hospital could actually fix.

This is the one rule applied without discussion: a review that identifies a person is removed, and doing it repeatedly costs the account.

No patient details of any kind — not names, not initials, not bed or room numbers, and not the extraordinary case you will remember for the rest of your career. A rare presentation, plus a month, plus a department, identifies a real person to everyone who was there, and they never agreed to appear in your review.

If a story only works with the clinical detail left in, it does not belong on this site. Tell it to your tutor instead.

• Be concrete. “Four students to one registrar, and we were taking histories on our own from the second day” tells a reader something. “Good hospital, nice staff” does not.
• Write only what happened to you. First-hand, from a placement you actually did. Not what someone told you about the night shift in another department.
• Cover the boring practicalities. They matter more than people admit: whether the ID badge exists on day one, whether the rota is published in advance, whether there is somewhere to change, eat, sit and pray, whether the on-call room is real.
• Say what would have made it better. “Fine, but no teaching” is a lower bar than “the ward round starts at seven and nobody tells students that — ask to join it and you will be taught”.
• Be fair about the bad days. One terrible week does not describe six months, and readers can tell the difference between a considered complaint and a bad mood.
• Length is not quality. Four honest sentences beat three paragraphs of adjectives.

The overall rating is required. The six sub-ratings are optional, and you should leave blank any you cannot judge — a blank is more useful than a guess, because each average is computed only over the reviews that answered that axis.

Rate them independently. Plenty of placements are genuinely excellent at teaching and genuinely brutal on hours, and flattening that into a single number is precisely the problem this site exists to fix.

• Choose a username with nothing of you in it: not your initials, not your graduation year, not the handle you use elsewhere.
• Leave out the details that pin a review to one person — exact dates, the size of your group, your specific project, the unusual thing only you did.
• If you were one of only one or two students in that department, write about patterns rather than incidents — and consider leaving the department box blank. It is optional, and a small named department plus a year narrows a review down fast.
• The site already widens your training year to a five-year band on facilities with fewer than five reviews. Do not undo that by putting the month in the text.

The privacy page explains exactly what the site stores, and is equally direct about the part it cannot protect: what you choose to write.

The database allows one review per account per facility. If you go back, or your view of a place changes, edit the review you already have rather than posting a second one — stacking reviews would tilt the average in favour of whoever writes most. Edited reviews are marked as edited, so a later reader can see the text changed.

Comments are for adding context: a follow-up question, or “this changed in 2024, the rota is different now”. Replies go one level deep on purpose — a review thread is not a forum, and the people who come here are choosing a placement, not having an argument.

A vote answers one question: was this review useful to someone choosing a placement? It does not mean you agree with it. Downvoting an accurate negative review because you are fond of the hospital is the fastest way to make the whole site worthless.

• Anything identifying a member of staff or a patient.
• Harassment, abuse or threats.
• Spam, advertising and recruitment posts.
• Reviews of a placement the author did not do.
• Claims presented as fact that are simply untrue.
• Content that is not about clinical training.

Use the report control on any review, comment or facility. A report records what was reported, the reason, an optional note, and which account sent it — so that repeated bad-faith reporting can be dealt with too. Reports go to a queue a person reads.

If a review breaks the rules on this page — it names one of your colleagues, it describes a patient, it is about somewhere the author never trained — report it and a moderator will look at it.

If it is simply unflattering and true, it stays. Nothing here can be bought, edited or withdrawn by the subject of it, which is the only reason any of it is worth reading.