The practices that cause difficulty are the popular ones
Three practices appear repeatedly in aesthetic clinic marketing and each scores 0 on this checklist: offering something in exchange for a review, asking patients privately how they feel and directing only the happy ones to a public platform, and supplying suggested wording to make reviewing easier.
All three are presented by the suppliers who sell them as efficiency measures. Each converts a public record into a marketing asset, and consumer protection law and the advertising codes both take the view that presenting curated or incentivised material as independent feedback misleads the reader. The Competition and Markets Authority has been explicit about the treatment of reviews as a consumer protection matter.
The reason the checklist scores them so severely is not moral. It is that they are the practices most likely to be identified, because they leave traces: the message offering the incentive, the routing logic in the software, the suspiciously similar phrasing across reviews.
The remedy is usually simpler than clinics expect. Ask everybody, offer nothing, supply no wording, and accept a lower response rate with a more credible record. Clinics that make this change often find their published record becomes more persuasive, because a page of uniformly enthusiastic five-word reviews is not read as evidence by anybody.
How to score this checklist
Read your own solicitation message as it is sent. Score criteria one to four from that text alone, plus whatever logic sits behind it in your software. If the software has a step that behaves differently for different responses, score criterion three 0.
For material connections, list every testimonial published on your own property and identify the person. Staff, relatives, people who received a treatment at no charge and anybody with a commercial relationship all require disclosure. Score 0 if any is undisclosed.
For selective editing, compare each published quotation with the original in full. The common failure is removing a qualifying clause: "the results were good, although the swelling lasted longer than I expected" becomes "the results were good". That changes meaning and scores 0.
For consent, look for a record per testimonial rather than a general permission. For fabrication, examine any supplier arrangement, including agencies that manage review responses, and satisfy yourself about what they do on your behalf. Uncertainty scores 0, because the clinic is responsible for what is published in its name.
Common scoring errors
Regarding a prize draw as different from a payment. It is an inducement. Score 0.
Treating a satisfaction survey as separate from review solicitation. If the survey routes satisfied respondents onward to a public platform, it is pre-screening.
Supplying examples to help patients write. Supplied wording appears in the resulting reviews and makes the record look manufactured, as well as scoring 0.
Assuming staff reviews are obvious enough not to need disclosure. They are not obvious to a reader, and disclosure is the requirement.
Relying on the platform's terms as your compliance. Platform terms are the platform's. Your obligations are yours.
Building a solicitation process that stays clean
The durable version of this is simple and should be written down. One request, sent to every patient at the same point in their care, containing no suggested wording, offering nothing, linking directly to a public platform without an intermediate question.
Add a review cycle for published testimonials. A quotation from a patient treated four years ago, by a clinician who has left, using a product no longer stocked, is stale even if it was accurate. Dating them makes this visible, which is why criterion seven exists.
Keep the consent record with the testimonial rather than in a separate system. The test is whether somebody could establish, in a minute, that this specific quotation may be published.
Then leave it alone. The strongest pressure on review processes is the temptation to intervene when the record is not going well, and every intervention is scored 0 by this checklist. If the record is unfavourable, the answer sits in the complaint handling assessment and in the clinical and communication instruments, not in the solicitation process.
Where testimonials are used in advertising rather than left on a platform, run the advertising compliance self-audit as well, since a testimonial used to support a clinical claim is subject to the substantiation rules that apply to the claim itself.