Making your GP surgery website a hit with patients

As demand soars, how can you make it easier for patients using your surgery website to complete tasks like making or cancelling an appointment? Tim Green, co-founder of the digital primary care platform GPsurgery.net, has some advice for practice managers looking to optimise their websites for maximum efficiency.

Your practice website is a virtual shop window for the surgery, and is an increasingly useful tool for reducing wasted practice and patient time.

Recent evidence-based guidance from NHS England’s Primary Care Transformation Team on creating a highly usable and accessible GP website for patients is a great new resource for practice managers. Offering practical advice and tips to improve the patient experience, reduce digital inequalities and remove barriers to access for patients with disabilities, the guidance is clearly focused on simplifying the patient journey.

Help patients to self-serve

According to the guidance, there are five tasks that your patients should be able to do quickly and easily using your website. They should be as easy to do on a mobile phone as on a desktop computer:

1. Make, change or cancel an appointment
2. Get a repeat prescription
3. Get a sick note for work
4. Get test results
5. Register with the practice

Patients should also be able to easily find the practice phone number, opening times and address.

Start with the home page

Clear signposting from the website home page is crucial for helping patients to complete the five key tasks. There should be quick links, high up on the home page, to all the common search terms.

Go with the less-is-more approach and declutter the home page by reducing the amount of text to an absolute minimum. Limit the words to calls to action (buttons or links) for key tasks.

If you’re using images to link to your online consultation submission form, make sure the image has appropriate alternative text to help patients with accessibility needs.

Watch this video to learn more about alternative text.

Your website should be easy to navigate, with a menu structure that focuses on the key tasks and a highly visible search box.

Reduce the number of content pages

Decluttering doesn’t stop at the home page. Review all the pages on your website and see if you can reduce them to the absolute minimum. This will make it easier for patients to find the important task-based pages. An added benefit is that you and your team will have fewer pages to update.

Avoid having health-related information on your website that needs constant checking and revising. Instead, link to trusted sources – for example, by embedding the NHS Health A-Z symptom checker, Live Well and health service finder widgets on the home page.

Write the content

Once patients have arrived at the page they’re looking for (with a single click or tap from the home page for key tasks), the content must be accurate, clear and concise. No one will bother to wade through long paragraphs of text on a web page.

Have in mind your patients with poor literacy skills. According to the NHS guidance, 11 million people in the UK have literacy challenges. Make the content accessible for everyone by writing shorter sentences and paragraphs and by using simple language.

Instead of: We run all our surgeries by an appointment-only system and appointments are of a ten-minute duration.

Shorten to: We run an appointment-only system and all appointments are for 10 minutes.

There is more guidance on how to write clear, accurate and concise content in the NHS content style guide.

Watch this video for our tips and examples of writing for your website.

The standard content offered by website providers should be accessible and well written. All the practice needs to do then is amend the copy rather than starting from scratch. Our own practice website content library is available free of charge for practice managers looking for accessible content.

Help patients understand how to contact the practice

For many patients, the ‘go to’ page on a practice website is the appointments page. With demand for appointments in primary care escalating, it’s therefore essential that the appointments page explains clearly to patients how they can contact and see a doctor or other healthcare professional.

It might be tempting to explain the administration process in the practice, but this can be hard for patients to understand. Instead, think of it from the patient’s perspective. Section 3.7 of the guidance recommends starting by writing down the different ways a patient can request help from the surgery in different scenarios (urgent or same-day, routine or out-of-hours appointments).

It is this information that will need to go on your appointments page. Section 3.8 of the guidance includes some sample copy for the appointments page, tested by users, which practices can adapt with links to their online consultation submission forms.

Next steps

Once you’ve optimised your home page, removed unnecessary content pages, simplified your website copy and set up the appointments page, you’re well on the way to making your website accessible and easy to use for patients.

The next part of this guide will look at some ‘good to haves’ and contract requirements for a top-notch practice website.