When Kelly Wellman was given the job of making sure the Memorial Medical Centre website was up to scratch, her priority was patient care. “We want our website to be accessible, easy for our patients to use and compliant with all the required standards,” she says.
Kelly, who is Data Quality and Project Administrator at the practice, started by reviewing the website audit report from the GP transformation team at NHS Kent and Medway ICB.
“The report gave the results for all the practices in Sittingbourne PCN and we were pleased to see that we had done pretty well,” says Kelly.
“There’s always room for improvement though, so my first port of call was to ask the team at our website provider, GPsurgery.net, to look at the results and make the changes needed to improve the website.”
Recommendations for improvment
Tim Green, who leads the GPsurgery.net support team, says: “The website was already scoring well on accessibility and usability, especially compared to the other practices in the PCN.”
Tim tasked one of his content editors to look at the audit report and make recommendations on what was needed to move the practice to a ‘well’ score across the site.
“The majority of our recommendations were to tweak the page content to match the best practice guidance set out in the GP Website Improvement Toolkit provided by the ICB,” says Tim.
“We also suggested restructuring the main menu to include the appointments and prescription pages, again following best practice guidance.” Tim’s team then went on to implement all their recommendations.
Taking the lead from patients
Delighted with the results of the improvement work, Kelly said: “Getting the key things from a patient’s perspective instantly accessible from the home page is so important. When I’m updating our practice website I don’t always see it through our patients’ eyes. We’ve got a great patient participation group (PPG) at the practice and they give us a lot of feedback which is really handy.”
Using a spreadsheet, Kelly then reviewed each page of the website with the PPG to test how easy it was to find key information on the website. “The feedback was fantastic and the work that the GPsurgery.net team has done has really helped.”
“I like to work out how to do things myself but when I opened up the audit spreadsheet I admit I felt a bit overwhelmed. Knowing Tim and his team were there to help was a big relief.”
“The support from GPsurgery.net is amazing – it’s like having a great big support blanket underneath me all the time which is just what I need in my job!”