A roadmap for the NHS UK website has been published following a period of collaboration between product managers and stakeholders, to provide insight on current and future developments.
Four main objectives are shared for nhs.uk in 2023/24, focused on maintaining and improving the existing service whilst making it more efficient and supporting initiatives involving the website.
The roadmap shares improvements currently underway and those for the future, with regard to key areas on nhs.uk.
Health advice and guidance
Currently, the team is working on designing a new hub to collate key health content for women; developing content types for contraception and tests; modularising medicines content so that specific sections of content can be used by the NHS App; and transforming a number of topics to better meet user needs and content design standards. In addition, reviews of pages and topics are underway to ensure clinical accuracy, and new children’s and young people’s mental health content is being designed.
Looking to the future, the team is developing content types for secondary care, long-term conditions and screening.
Accessing physical health services
At present, bank holiday opening hours information is taking focus, to ensure that the ‘find a pharmacy’ information is more accurate and useful for users. Work is underway to understand whether hospital metrics and scorecards are meeting people’s needs, along with increasing awareness and take-up of non-prescription pharmacy services.
The team aims to increase the number of flu vaccination appointments booked through the site and the app by collecting and displaying external booking links, and they are also testing automated moderation technology on reviews submitted by users. Other work sees the creation of reports for integrated care boards to access insights from user reviews of health services, the design of an alternative way of capturing and displaying star ratings, and better understanding of user needs, business needs and problems with the ‘contact us’ section.
Next, the technical design of ‘contact us’ and ‘find your NHS number’ services is to be streamlined, along with the route to finding a pharmacy offering the new blood pressure check service or accessing accurate information about sexual health services. Work is to focus on reducing the drop-out rate for users self-referring for NHS Talking Therapies, and the team will also be looking into extending ‘profile manager’ to cover secondary care services. Other plans include developing alerts and notifications to help profile managers make timely updates to information about their services, categorising user reviews for analysis, and adding more automated checks for reviews as they are submitted.
Transactional services
Work is underway to rebuild the blood pressure and BMI self-assessment tools, along with migrating the NHS website content API to the API catalogue.
Next, the Heart Age Tool will be improved to better meet user needs; the cardiovascular disease self-assessment tool with be aligned with standard NHS language, metrics, advice and policy; and the service search API will be migrated to the API catalogue.
Platform health
Work is currently focusing on investigating how feedback is captured, with the aim of better understanding ways to improve the demographic spread of feedback. Header and footer APIs are being improved to improve efficiency and consistency. In addition, the team is investigating how to optimise user journeys from nhs.uk to 111 Online, looking at how how testing can be run to support experiments in the future, and seeking to improve how users navigate from nhs.uk to their online health records.
Next, work will go into improving the relevancy of internal search results to make it easier for users to find what they are looking for; implementing changes on how feedback is captured; and better understanding how to improve user journeys from nhs.uk to online test results.
Campaigns
In this area, work is going into understanding and improving user journeys on Every Mind Matters, along with increasing organic search visits; aligning websites with new media campaigns; improving content on adult obesity; and replacing the current Campaign Resource Centre. In addition, a new weaning quiz is being launched to provide a simple, interactive resource for users, and a new baby basics hub is being published to provide post-birth content and support.
Plans for the future include improving wellness and sleep content in the self-help ideas hub, better understanding current users of School Zone and their needs, and developing new interactive elements to support planning of breastfeeding and weaning. New content about toddlers will also be added, and websites will be aligned with future media campaigns such as Stoptober.
