When the Lighthouse Medical Practice in Eastbourne were offered ICB funding to help refresh their website, their aim was to score top marks using the NHS England GP website benchmarking and improvement tool.
“The tool was the route to achieving the gold standard the ICB was looking for,” says Claire Carter, Senior Administration and Operations Manager at the practice.
Using the audit tool
Armed with the NHS guidelines for creating a highly usable and accessible GP website for patients, Claire worked with the team at GPsurgery.net to streamline the website in line with the requirements set out in the audit tool.
“I wanted to make sure that our website was as efficient as possible for patients to navigate,” says Claire. An important area of improvement was to make key online patient journeys, such as booking an appointment or ordering a repeat prescription, as simple and intuitive as possible.
“It’s all about the narrative too,” says Claire. “There’s a lot of helpful information in the benchmarking tool about the average reading age of patients and how important it is to keep the language simple and easy to understand.”
Working with GPsurgery.net to achieve a 99% score
Claire was able to use the GPsurgery.net editing tools to add the recommended content to the website. “I went through the site with a fine tooth comb and changed a lot of things myself,” she says. “Then the GPsurgery.net team kindly did anything I wasn’t sure about for me. Between us we managed to achieve one mark off the highest score possible!”
Things haven’t stopped there for Claire and her work on improving the practice website. “Our patients are quite active and give us regular feedback. I aim to get any changes or suggestions fed through to the site pretty quickly.”
PCN-wide survey
Claire will also be looking at the GPsurgery.net website analytics to see if the data can indicate where improvements can be made to the website. The results of a PCN-wide survey focusing on the digital aspects of the four practices in the network could also be useful. “We want to look at how easy it is for patients to find the information they need to self-refer and do things for themselves more easily, without having to contact their practice,” says Claire. “I’m hoping the results of the survey might give us a bit more insight into how patients are using the site.”
Setting the standard locally
Acknowledging the impressive score Lighthouse Medical Practice have achieved against the audit tool, the website is now being shared as an example of best practice across the ICB and local area. “It’s great to know our hard work has paid off and the practice website is now the benchmark for people to work towards,” says Claire.
“When people contact me to ask me which supplier we use for our website I always let them know about GPsurgery.net. The team is always super-helpful and get back to us so quickly. It’s an amazing service.”