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Abstract
Introduction Online resources are an important source of information about mental health issues and services for children and young people. Our service’s website had an out-of-date appearance and was aimed at professionals. More importantly, comments in our routinely collected patient experience data indicated that service users did not know what to expect when coming to our service.
Methods We followed the model for improvement by testing out changes in plan, do, study and act cycles that included a review of recently updated child and adolescent mental health services’ and youth charities’ websites, designing a new web page for our service and then testing out the website in focus groups. We used routinely collected patient experience data to assess impact on wider patient satisfaction.
Results Focus groups involving patients, parents and professionals judged the new website to be clearer, more attractive and easier to understand. Routine patient experience data did not reveal any website-specific feedback.
Conclusion This study demonstrates that it is easy and possible to create an attractive and accessible website for a mental health service using quality improvement methodology. In order to capture and integrate ongoing feedback about a service’s website from service users, routinely collected patient experience measures would need to ask specific questions related to this area. In this study, preproject and postproject patient experience data did not generate any specific comments.
- mental health
- quality improvement
- consumer health information
- access to information
- information technology
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Footnotes
Contributors AA and VD conceived the project idea and designed the project. AA developed the website template. Data were collected by AA, VD, BS, BY and HM. BS collated the data into Excel, which was then analysed and interpreted by AA. The article was drafted by AA with revisions and input from VD. AA and VD approved the final submitted version. AA submitted the paper and is the guarantor.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.
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