News > Using electronic media

This news story was reported by a number of publications this week after the findings from an internal Department of Health report were leaked to Health Service Journal.

The NHS spends up to £86m a year on thousands of websites that are difficult to find, confusing for patients and which do not meet their needs, according to research commissioned for a Department of Health report.

Research for the NHS Digital Communications Review, conducted by communications agency Precedent, found 2,873 nhs.uk websites that were in use and more than 1,000 other nhs.uk sites that were no longer active. A total of 287,300 web pages were accessible and Google listed 56 million pages within the nhs.uk domain.

The researchers concluded that the public would appreciate fewer contact points online but the digital communications review said there was not sufficiently strong evidence that there were too many NHS domains.Instead the review said there was a need for a digital brand strategy with standards for all NHS sites. It said a central information role was “sound in principle but its adoption requires a general acceptance that it is the role of the centre to perform this organising function.”

Researchers said that two of most recognised health service websites, NHS Choices and NHS Direct, were often competing for attention and although NHS Choices focuses on health information and local service data and NHS Direct offers online diagnostic tools the differences in content between the two was not clear to patients.

They added: “NHS Choices and NHS Direct are both established as national sites with similarities of positioning, brand and audience. This confuses users about the ‘definitive’ access point for NHS information and the roles of each site.”

Research for the review also concluded that GP practices websites were also the weakest of the health service’s online offerings. It added: “GP surgeries have by far and away the poorest sites, in that they have the largest percentage of problems identified. GP sites failed to provide the means to allow interaction with users.”

Taken from eHealth-Insider:
www.e-health-insider.com/news/6139/nhs_%C2%A386m_website_spend_confusing