Council the public and health

Socitm and NHM Choices Event 21st March, Manchester Royal Infirmary, Manchester.

One of the key themes from today’s event was exploring the relationship between Health and Councils.
According to Socitm – a quarter of residents think that Councils provide services such as hospitals, dentists and healthcare. A significant number of residents come to Council websites looking for information on health. This is estimated at 3% out of those 3% – 50% don’t find what they’re looking for. Local authority healthcare reforms are likely to add to the confusion and drive increases in unavoidable contact.

Each year councils receive over 72,000 calls relating to Health. Resulting in unhappy customers who are not finding the information they need, and impacting costs to councils.

The top 5 health related searches
• Contact information
• Jobs and training
• Adult social services
• Carers and care packages
• Disability [support and advice]

The top 3 recommendations were pretty common sense.

• Eliminate jargon – ensure that plain language is used throughout the site.
• Create well designed, accessible forms.
• Use all opportunities to promote online – the example given was library cards – having the web address.

Hampshire Council was put forward as an example of good practice

NHS Choices offer a range of packages available for syndication, including
Find Services, Carers Direct, Behind the headlines, Live Well, Health a-z conditions, Planners, Comments and Interactive tools.

NHS Choices syndication

Dr Alan Goodman – Met office – correlation between weather and Health – again met office offer a range of widgets

Better Connected – Martin Greenwood – SOCITM

Three main strands

• Think customer
• Be obsessed with top tasks
• Go Mobile

Two other points that were touched upon were the use of Social media and Hugh Flouch’s research on

Online Neighbourhood Networks

    Interesting observation from the morning

Liverpool have reduced their site from 4500 pages to 400 pages and strongly argue that devolved content management doesn’t work. That have actively removed all content from the site that isn’t relevant to their customers.