Medicspot Editorial & Content Policy

Medicpsot’s mission is to create quality healthcare experiences that are thoughtful and effortless. That includes providing up-to-date, accurate, trustworthy and helpful health information. Here’s our process for doing that.

Medicspot’s Medical and Healthcare Content Objectives

• Trustworthy
• Accurate
• Up to Date
• Evidence-based
• Easy to Understand and Accessible
• Empathetic
• Actionable
• Balanced
• Unique

You can find more information below on how our approach and processes are geared towards achieving these objectives.

We ensure our content is trustworthy by:

• only publishing Healthcare content that is written and reviewed by Healthcare Professionals
• regularly reviewing our content
• getting input from subject experts where possible

We ensure our content is accurate by:

• Regularly checking for updates. Our doctors follow the major guideline producers including NICE and SIGN, receives email updates regarding medicines and UK government health policy and keeps track of all the major journals, UK Royal Colleges and European Associations to keep abreast of new clinical developments.
• Scheduled Review dates. All of our health information pages are routinely reviewed every three years. In the event of major or multiple changes to guidance, a prompt ad hoc review will be arranged.

We ensure our content is evidence-based by:

• including a list of recommended sources in our content briefs, including:
  • Medical Journals 
  • Scientific Papers 
  • NHS 
  • Health Charity websites
• providing and including supporting citations for important claims and recommendations

We ensure our content is easy to understand by:

• writing for the public, not clinicians
• explaining any potentially new or confusing terminology
• assuming an average reading age (UK)
• providing authors with our style guide, including advice to use short sentences and simple language
• making sure all articles are reviewed by a non-clinician native speaker (as well as a Healthcare Professional) to make sure they are easy to understand
• never charging for access to our Health Guides
• providing video content as an alternative to written content where possible

We ensure our content is empathetic by:

• never using “clickbait” or mocking language
• providing authors with our style guide, including advice on Tone of Voice and empathy
• making sure all articles are reviewed by a non-clinician native speaker (as well as a Healthcare Professional) to make sure they are empathetic as well as being accurate

We ensure our content is actionable by:

• including recommended next steps where it’s possible to do so safely
• providing links to our online GP consultation services for those who wish to discuss their specific case in detail
• providing links to other suitable courses of action – eg home test kits, Referral Letters – if available

We ensure our content is balanced by:

• making it clear where there are pro’s and con’s
• making it clear when information is unfounded, unproven or controversial
• using authoritative authors, reviewers and contributors who have a broad understanding of views on the topic
• we also try to provide a counter-balance to (online) health misinformation by debunking common and persistent myths where there is clear evidence to do so

We ensure our content is unique by:

• writing all our content from scratch
• write content that relates to our areas of expertise:
  • General Practice
  • Telemedicine (Remote Consultations)
• provide comment on how effective it is to remotely diagnose and treat the conditions discussed in the content

Healthcare is an important “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) subject, and we have a duty to our patients and audience to provide High Quality content and avoid inaccurate, misleading or out-of-date Health Content. Our process to ensure this is:

1. Content brief researched created – Marketing Team
2. Content brief reviewed – Marketing Team
3. Author briefed – Marketing Team
4. First Pass Marketing review (Focus = Quality) – Marketing Team
5. Second Pass Marketing review (Focus = Ease of Understanding and Accessibility) – Marketing Team
6. Clinical review – Independent Expert or Internal Clinical Team
7. Sign Off – Internal Clinical Team via Slack channel
8. Content published – Marketing Team
9. Any feedback monitored – CS & Marketing Team via Slack channel
10. Schedule content review for every 3 years – Marketing Team

Marketing Team person responsible = Rob Farrow

Clinical Team person responsible = Adam Abbs

• Usage of medical terms – where required use medical terms to describe the illness/disorder.
• Medical terms should also be explained in “plain English” to ensure the casual reader understands.
• Content will be reviewed by medical professionals who might request content and/or Tone of Voice changes to ensure articles are clear and helpful.
• Use well-researched and confirmed medical theories and facts. Avoid controversial medical theories which don’t have confirmation in research papers and journals. Use citations, sources and references to back up any important claims. 
• Use a professional writing style, but remain empathetic and use easy-to-understand language.
• For In-depth articles use 3rd person and for top level pages use 2nd person.
• Present content in an easy-to-digest format (eg short, logical sentences and bullet points where appropriate)
• Use an active voice, avoid a passive voice.
• Use positive — not negative — a language where possible.
• Keep it concise. Brevity reigns.
• Contractions add a level of informality, without sounding too conversational. We like them.
  • Medicspot is always capitalised as so, and always one word.
  • We use…
    • Sentence case for Titles.
    • Sentence case for Body Copy (always finishing with a full stop).
    • Sentence case for CTAs.
  • We use British English, always (watch out for those wandering Zzzzz).
  • We dislike the semicolon — we prefer the em dash. Or a simple full stop.

• Try to use factual sentence structures (instead of “X is known for Y” use “X does Y”)
• Try to use research, and university studies to prove the point (instead of “X provides Y” use “According to Z University research from Z Department, on C date, X provides Y”)
• Be precise when referring to Entities (eg correct organisation names, publication names, names of experts)
• Be concise (X is the most common Y -> X is D% of Y)
• Include branded images with a unique composition (Medicspot can source/create these if required; please provide a brief for each image/chart/infographic)
• If you write about a specific topic, try to not break the context across multiple paragraphs. Usually breaking the content with a new paragraph means you are changing the topic from X to Y. (Breaking paragraphs is fine for changing between subtopics. For example, you could create a paragraph in which you explain natural treatments for specific conditions and in the new paragraph explain over-the-counter medicine available for those conditions.)
• Have a logical discourse flow (ie the sense of the content). Try to ensure that each sentence’s meaning is dependent on the meaning of the previous sentence. The content should have a good flow and sentences nearby should be related logically.
• Protect the Q&A format – Use the Q&A format to answer the most important questions. The Q&A format should contain the question as an H2 header, and the answer as a paragraph. Don’t put unnecessary distance between question and answer.
• Do not break the information graph with complicated transitions, ambiguous language or unexpected analogies. Follow a logical order in declarations.
• Use shorter sentences as much as possible.
• Decrease the count of contextless words in the document.
• If the word doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence, delete it.