{"id":18051,"date":"2018-07-05T08:23:05","date_gmt":"2018-07-05T07:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/helpfuldigital.com\/?p=18051"},"modified":"2020-05-28T10:46:37","modified_gmt":"2020-05-28T09:46:37","slug":"happy-birthday-to-the-nhs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helpfuldigital.com\/fr\/happy-birthday-to-the-nhs\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday to the NHS!"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a team here at Helpful, we’ve got our share of personal connections to the NHS at painful and joyful moments in our own lives. So as the NHS turns 70 this week, we’ve been looking back at some of the NHS projects we’ve done in our eight years working with the NHS and related organisations.<\/p>\n

Back in 2012-13, reforms to the health and care system were becoming real, with the formation of NHS England<\/strong>. Our work with the Department of Health to shift the organisation off an exorbitant enterprise content management system and onto something more flexible meant NHS England\u2019s first steps online were on a WordPress platform<\/a>, \u2018HealthPress\u2019:<\/p>\n

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WordPress also proved to be a great platform for St George\u2019s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust<\/strong>. In 2013, we worked together with their in-house team to build a bright, engaging, mobile-friendly site (unusual at the time!) to help St George\u2019s meet the needs of patients more effectively, while also telling its amazing stories. Now, you can find more about their work on Channel 4\u2019s award-winning \u201924 Hours in A&E<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

For the last few years, the media has questioned the NHS\u2019 ability to cope with winter flu cases or cyber attacks<\/strong>. While so far, disaster has fortunately been averted, we\u2019ve played our part in bringing health organisations together to build connections and understanding through simulating crisis situations on our training platform. While rehearsing comms plans was useful in itself, as Susy from the Department of Health put it in her reflective blog post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“I also learnt a lot from watching colleagues in action who I don\u2019t normally sit with \u2013 watching lines to take being written and agreed in seconds, when I was still trying to get my head around the situation, was pretty impressive. Although it wasn\u2019t our main objective, the afternoon was a great team builder.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The NHS has had its failures and tragedies too, and there\u2019s a role for frank, open digital communication about what\u2019s gone wrong and how to put it right. We helped the Department of Health<\/strong> publish the\u00a0response to the Francis Inquiry<\/a> into deaths at Mid-Staffordshire Hospital, using digital tools to make the Government\u2019s response easier to access by theme or audience, while policy civil servants blogged frankly about the challenges involved<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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More recently, we\u2019ve helped NHS organisations in London to do more with less while continuing to be creative online. We’ve helped NHS Go<\/a><\/strong> to evaluate and improve their social media activity. Our work with the Healthy London Partnership<\/a><\/strong> has grown from a pledge site, to a resource library for local campaigners on the the issue of childhood obesity, to a low-cost hub for the programme\u2019s resources and toolkits, saving the NHS thousands on creating separate microsites and supporting the Mayor’s agenda to tackle the big causes of ill-health in the capital.<\/p>\n

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In the last 12 months, I\u2019ve been back to my home town of Hastings to work with the East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust<\/strong>, as they replaced a creaking website and extranet with a new, user-centred approach. We\u2019ve loved testing with users to ensure the site works intuitively on different devices and with different levels of experience.<\/p>\n

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Testing with users – under the watchful (and slightly disturbing) gaze of medical training dummies<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s been particularly rewarding to work with a smart and confident comms team, who aren\u2019t afraid to be creative with the tools we give them – like this simple animation showing the Trust\u2019s incredible progress<\/a> from a damning CQC inspection, to top marks in recent reports. The Health Secretary is impressed (with their progress – but we reckon he’d like the website too).<\/p>\n

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A brilliant turnaround story @ESHTNHS<\/a> which has been taken out of special measures for quality today \u2013 some challenges remain, but to be recognised as one of the most improved trusts in England for emergency care is a colossal achievement https:\/\/t.co\/xbfxa0XLJt<\/a><\/p>\n

— Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) June 6, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n