Governance in healthcare is referred to as clinical governance, “a system through which NHS organisations are accountable for continuously improving the quality of their services and safeguarding high standards of care by creating an environment in which excellence in clinical care will flourish”.
A fundamental principle of the Healthier Together (HT) programme is to deliver information and advice that is reliable, consistent, and trustworthy.
Due to the serious impact that this advice on user’s healthcare decisions, it is of paramount importance that we ensure rigorous governance processes to uphold the reliability of the content:
The above steps make sure that patient safety is ensured by reducing the risk of having outdated or unreliable advice on the website.
The Executive Team contains a clinical lead, a project manager, an acute lead, a maternity lead, and a lead for mental health. All members are well connected within their respective area, and they will notify the team when there needs to be changes to the website content.
It is extremely important that Healthier Together offers content that is accessible and reflects the need of the local population.
After a page has been formally signed off, it is important for executive team to know that the content is also accessible and correct from an everyday user perspective: the general public. To make sure the new content meet user standards, we add a survey to every new page which asks whether the page has been useful and if the user has any feedback. The survey remains on the page until the page has reached a certain amount of views, and then it is being taken off. During that we will respond to any feedback and make changes where necessary. We also intermittently conduct focus group sessions to gather additional feedback in order to improve the website.
To have an even closer engagement with website users, we invite specific demographic users to join our executive meeting where we present them with content which is relevant to them e.g. maternity pages for a pregnant woman and growing up pages for a young person.