Many of the practice managers we work with tell us they know their website is no longer serving its purpose, but that they don’t know how to go about improving it. The nation’s rapid reliance on and shift into digital healthcare post-pandemic has significantly increased the need for better, more streamlined digital services in primary care, but many practices are still trying to catch up.
The problem for patients with GP websites;
- Without consistent language, designs and formats, websites can become difficult to navigate
- Content is written offline and poorly translated when viewed online
- Accessibility issues make online transactions difficult if GOV.UK and NHS service standards are not met
Do any of these issues ring true for you and your practice site? If so, read on to find out how we can help you grow and embed digital relationships with your patients, and how we work with practices to develop online services that improve the digital journey for both staff and patients.
Creating accessible websites and improving the digital journey
We help practices provide patients with an accessible and easy to use website. By migrating away from ad-hoc websites to a digital first approach, we are capable of handling transactions online, writing into clinical systems and adding value to the patients online journey.
By working with us, you are joining a community, platform-based website. The design architecture doesn’t change from site to site. To explain, let’s use this analogy:
If you are buying a house from an architect off plan, every house on the development might look the same, or very similar. They’d be built to a specification and designed in the most efficient way. When you then move into the house, you would soon add your own style, you’d make it your own, and you’d make it work for you.
With practice websites, we follow the same approach. You have a standardised, tried and tested framework, which you can tailor to your individual needs.
When we’ve delved into the problems with GP sites, we found that the real issues are around the quality of how they were originally built, the content design and, most importantly, the experience a patient would have when using the website – there were frequent accessibility issues, content was badly designed, and often there was too much unnecessary information on the screen.
GPs were also not using NHS digital service manual. Our team has helped build NHS.co.uk, so we know how to create sites that align with the manual.
Working in partnership with practices to deliver digital change
For us to help a practice create a brand new site, the process is very simple. We take them through an onboarding stage where they complete a questionnaire – this will tell us all we need to know about their current site and their needs and wants. We then begin to create the content, and we set up an nhs.uk domain name. In just 2-3 weeks we can make the new site live. It is as simple as that.
Practices have the ability to update some of the content themselves, but we remain on hand to help with more significant developments.
As General Practice continues to embrace and navigate the changes Covid has created between primary care and digital, we must ensure we provide high-quality, efficient and secure online services to patients that also don’t create more work for over-stretched practice teams. With pre-built information pages, content editors and automated updates available to practices, we provide a service that contributes to releasing staff time away from the maintenance of online services, and back to the patient.
