The confidentiality trap
The instinct is to correct the record: they arrived late, they refused the treatment plan, they were never even seen here. Every one of those responses confirms or denies a clinical relationship in public, which is a confidentiality breach regardless of what the reviewer themselves disclosed.
So the reply never engages with the facts. "We take this seriously and we'd like to understand what happened — please contact the clinic directly" says everything a reader needs without conceding or confirming anything.
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Write for the reader, not the reviewer
The reviewer has already decided. The audience is the next hundred prospective patients who will read that exchange while deciding whether to book — and what they are assessing is not whether the complaint was fair, but how the clinic behaves when something goes wrong.
That is why a calm, short, non-defensive reply is a conversion asset. Clinics with one bad review answered well often convert better than clinics with none at all, because the reader now has evidence the other reviews are real.
Then take it offline properly
Reply publicly once, within a day, then do the actual work privately: find out what happened, call them if you can, and fix the process if the complaint was fair. A patient whose complaint was genuinely addressed will sometimes update the review, and often stops telling the story.
Never ask them to remove it as your opening move. Solve the problem and let the removal be their idea — pressure is how a small complaint becomes a public campaign.