Managing a website for an NHS Trust can be a difficult job, especially with limited time and budget available. However the web is a hugely important communication channel, which when well managed and maintained can actually reduce your hospital expenditure. If users can find exactly what they need online, this will often save you the overall cost of a phone call, or indeed of dealing with the person face-to-face at the hospital. The following figures are taken from the SOCITM Better connected report 2009:
Face to face £6.56 per visit
Phone £3.22 per call
Web £0.27 per visitor
Just think of the savings you could make if you focus on making the website a more accessible channel.
Read on to find out more an NHS trust who have done that very thing.
Amy Weir had heard of Siteimprove through a web manager contact at one of the local councils. As communications officer at East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust, she was keen to take up the offer of a free trial of SiteCheck. Whilst the Trust had been focussing on accessibility Amy explained that they had
‘nothing for broken link checking’ so this was a job that previously had to be done manually.
On taking a trial, Amy found that SiteCheck gave a very accurate first crawl of the website, in particular stating she was
‘surprised at the number of pages having not realised they had increased this much!’ During the 14 day trial, Amy’s contact at Siteimprove was a single dedicated account manager, so she didn’t have to deal with different people at each stage of the process. Her account manager gave her a thorough walkthrough of SiteCheck where she had the chance to see the main features and benefits of the service. Amy’s impression was that SiteCheck is
‘very intuitive’ and she also found the SiteAlarm service particularly useful. As well as SiteCheck giving you peace of mind by checking for broken links, potential misspellings and accessibility issues, SiteAlarm will monitor the uptime and response time of your website, ensuring you are the first to be notified by email or SMS if your website goes down.
On finding out that SiteAlarm is also offered free on purchase of SiteCheck, Amy quickly got approval to go ahead and within three weeks of taking a trial, East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust became another satisfied Siteimprove customer.
‘SiteCheck really helps in finding broken links and other issues on the website. Having SiteAlarm gives us added security in knowing we will know straight away if there is a problem with our site.’