The National Health Service (NHS) provides free healthcare to UK citizens from the cradle to the grave. In 2013 it was split into 600+ regional clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), with responsibility for providing healthcare devolved to local professionals. Each CCG has to fulfill a number of statutory requirements, be consultative with its resident base and be both accountable and visible. Online engagement is a key part of that and is a key organisational objective of the sites we build for them.
At miggle, weâve worked with NHS Brighton and Hove Clinical Commissioning Group since its inception, re-launching the first site we built for them in 2013 in June 2015 alongside a significant content audit. To keep maintenance and hosting costs down we run five separate sites for the CCG all off the same code base.
1 Public Site
http://www.brightonandhoveccg.nhs.uk/
This site serves two main purposes.
Firstly, it provides the residents of Brighton and Hove with details on how health care services are managed and provisioned in the city. It also provides links to statutory information, like papers and minutes on CCG board meetings.
Secondly, it links, via an API, with the âFind Your Nearestâ and âMedical Conditionsâ services on the UK-wide NHS Choices site, with all local services and information on conditions indexed in the site's search. Content Managers can augment this data with details of local health based services which aren't held on NHS Choices.
2. Heroes site
http://www.wecouldbeheroes.nhs.uk/
A mobile-first site, which, based on the users location and the time of day to suggest providers for a range of health needs with a view to reducing load on hospitalâs accident and emergency departments.
3. GP Extranet
The extranet is used by medical staff (i.e. Doctors, Nurses, Consultants and Surgeons) in the cityâs surgeries, health centres and hospitals. It holds key information on health processes and procedures, as well as information on treatments and drugs prescriptions for various conditions. Patient health and well-being depends on this site being available 24/7/365, so uptime and performance are critical.
4. Staff extranet.
Holds key information for NHS business and admin staff including relevant news and information and links to various resources.
5. Clinical mobile app for GPs
The content from NHS Choices is repurposed and augmented to provide a mobile-optimised service for out of hours GPs to use to quickly and easily make referrals to out of hours facilities to follow certain medical pathways based on conditions.
About the project
Goals
Itâs essential that doctors, surgeons and nurses understand the context in which they are providing healthcare to patients (and for patients to know what they are entitled to), so another key objective is to make clinical care information easily accessible to professionals, so they can use it to fulfill their roles 24/7/365, but also to have that information open to those service users who want to find it.
In an age of austerity, with budgets under pressure itâs key that the public are educated and informed as to how to make best use of the services they are entitled to, so that load can be reduced on the most critical services, such as A&E (Accident and Emergency)
Requirements
Following an independent audit of their existing extranet website Brighton & Hove CCG chose miggle to address the usability issues that had been identified and were able to make some unanticipated cost savings in the process
The extranet website needed a complete re-design to be more user friendly and increase user engagement.
A separate project to build a public facing website was initiated and miggle were asked to help write the requirements doc for this
It soon became apparent that both sites could be developed on the same code-base with the opportunity to make significant cost savings
âChallenges
Overcoming resistance to change and the adoption of new technology
Addressing the requirements of multiple stakeholders within a limited budget
Ensuring compliance with statutory requirements in a number of areas
Solution
As authors of the requirements doc miggle applied their expertise to propose a solution where both websites could be built around a single code base - significantly reducing the cost of this project
Drupal was the obvious choice of technology because of the ease with which workflows, roles and permissions can be customised
A comprehensive and easy to navigate website was designed around functionality that ensures a site future-proofed for years to come - including but not limited to:
Outcomes
Year-on-year since launch Brighton & Hove CCG has seen:-
39.67% increase in sessions
22.11% increase in pageviews
48.85% increase in use of the staff extranet
By proposing a solution that meant both the extranet and the public facing website were built on the same code-base, the CCG made a large and unanticipated cost saving.
The site structure has enabled us to easily develop additional sites (micro sites, mobile sites etc.) with efficient re-purposing of data and content. This has kept costs down for Brighton & Hove CCG
http://www.wecouldbeheroes.nhs.uk/
http://www.gp.brightonandhoveccg.nhs.uk/clinical-app
The site was a finalist in Acquiaâs Engage awards for 2016
We are proud to support our NHS and have made the NHS Distro available to other CCGs so they can benefit from an âout of the boxâ CMS that meets all compliance requirements:
Why Drupal was chosen
NHS Brighton and Hove already had one site on Drupal at the point we took them on as a client, so it made sense to continue with it. That said, it's more than suitable for the NHS because of the fact, as an open source solution it provides a number of key technological and organisational benefits, which allow the client to act with a good degree of self-sufficiency and freedom.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
TBC
