NHS Black Country ICB has shared how its digital first primary care team led a GP website improvement programme, supporting all 171 GP practices in the Black Country to update their websites as part of efforts to improve accessibility and ensure that sites are user friendly.
The ICB highlights how the project saw an “extensive amount of research, design and development” to ensure that changes to the websites met user needs, with the team engaging with patient participation groups, people panels and GP/PCN events.
One of the aims of the project was to allow patients to easily access GP services online and to be quickly signposted to the information or tools to manage their care and to improve their online experience.
From Eve Hill Medical Practice, practice manager Kelly Houseman notes that the updates website has supported staff in prioritising appointments and identifying enquiries that can be managed at less busy times. She also highlights how the website has improved patient choice and helped reduce pressure on phone lines, stating that “feedback from both patients and staff alike has been really positive”.
Sarb Basi, Director of Primary Care for the NHS Black Country ICB, added: “General Practice websites play an important role as the “digital front door” for patients seeking medical advice and services.
“By ensuring GP websites are easy to use and accessible, thousands of patients can now contact their practice online to ask for help, complete admin tasks and navigate themselves to services, reducing the need to call the practice on the phone.”
Primary care in the news
At the start of the month, HTN reported how NHS England published the latest statistics on appointments in general practice, with a breakdown of appointment mode showing an increase of almost 900,000 in the number of appointments delivered online or through video conferencing in September 2024.
Other recent news has included plans around new laws intended to allow patient records to be made available across all GP surgeries, trusts and ambulance services; and the BMA and GPC England sharing an update on NHSE plans to extract data from GP clinical systems on cloud-based telephony usage.
We also examined plans around the primary care implementation of the NHS patient safety strategy, noting the role of digital and data in areas such as automatically flagging patient safety issues to support reliability, and supporting clinical decision-making by digitally embedding diagnosis advice and safety netting.
On 5 December, HTN will be hosting a panel discussion focusing on how data can be utilised to transform primary care; sign up for your free NHS ticket here.
And you can find an overview of a previous panel exploring innovation in primary care here, which saw HTN joined by health tech professionals from Conisbrough GPs, South Yorkshire Primary Care Workforce & Training Hub, and Digital Health and Care Wales.
