News > Accessibility and usability

123 members took part in the PiF membership survey this year- or as it's now called, 'PiF Pulse'. The aim of the membership survey was twofold:

• To help us, and you, get a clear picture of consumer health information in the UK - this gives us the information to campaign or lobby on your behalf and helps you to see what others are doing.
• To help us develop membership benefits and services for you, which meet your needs.
  

The headlines below give just a small flavour of the results. A more details report can be downloaded by clicking here. For the questions where respondents were asked to give their comments, a selection of quotes have been given which cover the main points.

"It's still very difficult to get clinicians and politicians to take this work seriously despite lobbying and despite all the political drivers, the latest being the pledges in the NHS Constitution. Despite this being a standard with which NHS trusts must comply, it's still subject to a lip service and lack of response in some quarters."
Survey respondent

• The average PiF member is educated to a high level, works in a senior or middle management position and is active in their professional development. That’s great news for the sector and for the future of consumer health information.
• As a format, web based information had caught up with printed, though there are still large numbers of you offering printed information. Newer forms of information delivery are still not used widely.
• The budget spend on health information, and the staff resources allocated to it, still seems to be very small compared to the size of many organisations. Half of respondents are NHS organisations, yet half of respondents are spending less than £10,000 a year.
• Health information in general seems to be increasing in importance in the NHS, but it's worrying that most NHS respondents have no allocated budget for it. It seems that the importance isn’t reflected in physical resources.
• Some of the main issues in consumer health information are lack of money, resources and board level/management support for health information; poor evidence, or lack of evidence, about the efficacy of health information; best practice and sharing; and access and quality issues.