If you’re interested in this Guardian article about a leaked document on NHS websites, you might also be interested in seeing the list of 4,282 websites I recently received from the department. Have a look through and let me know what you think of the best and worst!
The document that the Guardian have been leaked was produced under the last government. I asked Conservative Health Minister Simon Burns to publish it last month. He refused.
More and this after my Michael Gove meeting!
3 comments ↓
The naming conventions for the NHS are awful. Who decides to put in SO many acronyms. It’s a pain to use and anyone in search engine optimisation or usability will back that up.
It would be better to have useful .org.uk domains than force trusts and GP practices into this jelly mould.
NHS websites could learn a thing or two from council websites, which have a far more difficult job in terms of range and complexity of services offered, and in most cases, do it pretty well.
Socitm’s experience with local authorities suggests that benchmarking and sharing of best practice is the answer – not top down standards and other prescriptive solutions.
Better connected, our annual survey of all local authority websites, our the Website Takeup service, which monitors numbers using council websites and their satisfaction with them, allow web managers to see how their site is performing against those of their peers, in terms of usefulness, usability, usage, and the success of customers in finding what they want. Those that are doing less well can easily learn from the best.
Socitm has been benchmarking council sites since 1999, and its not unconnected with this that the best ones score very highly in terms of customer takeup, satisfaction, and usage.
There is no reason why such performance can’t be replicated by NHS organisations. And it doesn’t require central control – just a desire on the part of individual organisations to get together with their peers to improve on what they do.
Yikes! Thought I was looking at the Way Back Machine for a while then.
Not had a look at all – but the best so far is Nottingham Uni – although linking to the Intranet seems a bit of a strange choice for a public facing site.
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