Community guidelines

Write this

• Your own first-hand experience of the community — as a resident, a family member, someone who toured, a friend, or a care professional who worked with it.
• Specifics. What the care was actually like, how staff handled a hard day, what the food is, what the billing looked like, what you wish you had asked.
• When it happened. A community under new management two years on is a different place.
• The disappointing parts. A review that is only praise helps nobody choose.

Leave this out

• Other residents' names, diagnoses, medications or anything about their health. Write about your own experience and your own family member.
• Staff members' last names, and anything that would identify a staff member who is not a public figure of the community.
• Phone numbers, addresses, emails or anything else private — yours or anyone else's.
• Anything you were paid, discounted or housed for, and anything written by or for the community, a competitor, or a placement service.
• Legal threats, accusations of a crime, or a dispute still in progress. Those belong with your state licensing agency or the Long-Term Care Ombudsman, who can act on them.

Judge the community, not the people who live there

Do not write that a community is good or bad because of the race, religion, national origin, sex, disability or family makeup of its residents, and do not ask for a recommendation on that basis. Fair housing law covers senior living, and we remove this on sight.

Every thread belongs to one of six topics:

• Choosing care — comparing options, timing a move, touring.
• Paying for care — costs, benefits, long-term care insurance, Medicaid, VA.
• Memory care — dementia care, behaviour, specialised units.
• Caregiver support — the part that falls on the family.
• Health conditions — living with a condition, in general terms.
• Moving in — the transition, the first weeks, what to bring.

Ask real questions and answer them plainly. Share what happened to you rather than what someone else should do. Do not recommend a dose, a drug, a treatment or a legal strategy. And do not post about a named community's care in a discussion — that is what a review is for, and it is where the community can reply.

• Pretend to be someone else, or hide that you work for or compete with a community.
• Harass, threaten, demean or abuse another person here.
• Advertise, recruit or sell — including placement services, home care and lead generation.
• Post the same thing repeatedly, or post from more than one account.
• Post someone else's photo or writing as your own.

• Reviews are read before they appear. There is a wait between writing one and seeing it on the site.
• We may remove or hide anything that breaks these guidelines, and we may close an account that keeps doing it.
• A community can reply to a review, once, as itself. It cannot have a review taken down for being unflattering, and it cannot pay to change the order reviews appear in.
• Report anything. Write to hello@kinnwell.com with what you saw and where. Reports come to our team, not to the community.
• Disagree with a decision? Write to hello@kinnwell.com and a person will look again.

These guidelines sit under the Terms of Service, which is the agreement that governs what you post, the licence you give us to publish it, and how copyright and takedown notices work. What we collect, and what becomes public, is in the Privacy Policy.