The Client

The NHS Newcastle Primary Care Trust currently provides health care services for the North of Tyne area’s residents. They are also responsible for improving the general health of the area by running health improvement initiative, raising awareness of health issues and encouraging people to take responsibility for their own welfare.

The Brief

The NHS Newcastle Psychological Service needed a website to publicise and raise awareness of the services they provide. This in turn would help with the Primary Care Psychology referral and assessment process. Furthermore the site needed to engage the audience with well presented information, graphics and video.

The Solution

The design we developed for the website features strong NHS branding as required by the NHS brand guide, but within this we created a very strong individual identity. The light calming colours, handwritten typography and quirky touches such as the post-it note illustrations lend the site a friendly and informal air. As the NHS is a public body, accessibility was particularly important in this project. We followed strict DDA accessibility guidelines in terms of the design, codin, and cross browser compatibility for the site.

WordPress was used as a CMS for its flexibility and ease of use. This has enabled the client to expand the site considerably since it went live; adding pages and content with no additional input required on our part. Media such as images, videos, audio and Flash animations have also been added quickly and easily.

In order to address the core requirement of the brief we integrated an advanced self assessment/referral section. It took close collaboration with the client to develop the architecture of the system so it would function exactly as envisaged and it was built entirely from the ground up.

The self assessment asks a series of questions related to specific areas of concern, and from that generates scores for those areas. These scores can help the user to assess their own state of mind or they can refer themselves via the website for further help.

Submitted referral forms are stored in the WordPress back end where new submissions are highlighted, this allows the administrator to manage enquiries within the website. Notes can be added to these submissions to track the progress of the individual. Details and assessment scores of each referral can be exported as a PDF or all referrals exported to an Excel spreadsheet.

The assessment form is designed to be as user friendly as possible, and to ‘degrade gracefully’ when users who have older browsers need to see a simplified version.