NHS - Waltham Forest - THE HOUSE LONDON

NHS – Waltham Forest

Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) play a vital role in planning and commissioning healthcare services for local populations. Yet many CCGs find it difficult to raise the profile of their organisation and explain the positive impact that they have on their local population’s health and wellbeing.

Waltham Forest CCG, who commission local healthcare services for residents of the London Borough of Waltham Forest, understand the importance of communicating who they are and what they do. They aim to be open and transparent in their decision-making process encouraging input from a wide range of people in shaping healthcare services in the borough, specifically from patients and carers.

As part of their drive to improve communications and engagement within the borough, Waltham Forest CCG commissioned a new website for their organisation from NEL CSU. Working in partnership us, NEL CSU project managed the development of a website that was simple-to-use, modern, and relevant.

The new website is found at – www.walthamforestccg.nhs.uk

What was the problem?

Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) play a vital role in planning and commissioning healthcare services for local health populations. Many CCGs find it difficult to raise their organisation’s profile and explain the positive impact that they can have on health and wellbeing.

A problem that a lot of CCG’s have is the fact that their websites don’t communicate who they are and what they do in an effective and clear way, Waltham Forest understand the importance of this and wanted this communicated in their new website.

Another issue identified within most CCG websites was the lack of multiple language options. With the multicultural element of many communities continuing to grow it is important to provide people with a lesser understanding of English language with the important option of viewing pages on the website.

And how did we solve it?

61% of the UK population now use their mobile phone to access the internet. With this figure continuing to grow, and having a local population who are actively “on-the-go” it was common sense to provide residents with a website design which was compatible across both desktop and mobile formats. Importantly with half of all visitors that visited the site visiting from smartphones and tablets, we ensured that the website was designed well enough for the user experience to be optimised across all devices.

We also made the site with a clear layout of the important content presented in a modern and relevant way on the home screen. This made it easier for residents to find the information they want to know quicker. This also helped Waltham Forest to communicate their message and profile to their residents to a much better standard than before.

After recognising the problem of there being a lack of language options on most CCG websites, we solved this problem by incorporating the Google Translate widget into the build so now its possible for residents to choose their first language from 10 different options – including Bengali, Lithuanian, Polish, Punjabi and Urdu – based on local insight about the most read languages in the borough.