The Health and Social Care Digital Service | Simon Dixon | July 2014

Editor's Notes

1. What we are offering at a national level to support the implementation of the care bill and provide the public with a personalised, joined up, digital journey across health and care.
2. NHS Choices remains one of the biggest health websites in Europe. Since its launch in 2007 the number of visitors has increased from 1.7m per month to over 40 million per month and still continues to grow. Building on this success we are continuing to evolve NHS Choices to create a more transparent, transactional and participative service. Transparency of information to allow public make educated choices and to hold services to account by the publication of performance data Transactions and the provision of tools to support the public better manage their health and care themselves such as booking a GP appointment online, or ordering a repeat prescription Participation then will be the natural evolution of the previous two and the ‘activation’ of the public to be fully participative in their own health and care. As part of this evolution we are working more explicitly across health, public health and social care
3. I’ve talked about the growth of NHS Choices and how we are evolving the service. Next I’m going to talk through what we are doing for social care.   Care and support is an essential guide to social care. It also offers content and advice to the millions of people in England who look after someone else, including information about benefits, local care services, and more. Develop and extend social care content to reflect the new Care Bill to provide people with relevant information for their care planning. As part of this work we will also improve the on site search and navigation as well as links back to local authority websites.   Expand common health questions to common health and care questions. We currently provide a database of the most commonly asked health questions and we are working with ADASS and several local authorities to expand this to cover common social care questions. We are compiling the top questions which have been asked to councils, particularly around the Care Bill and what it means to the public.
4. Provide users with relevant quality and performance data to support the public to participate in holding their services to account. Including the ASCOF data which we have recently brought into the NHS Choices accountability area. Every CQC registered adult social care provider (care homes, home care, supported living and shared lives schemes) has an online quality profile on NHS Choices, which the provider can edit for free.   The profiles provide the public and professionals with a comprehensive and trusted source of comparative information about registered care providers anywhere in England. This also means that local websites do not need to replicate this content and can instead focus on local support. They also contain any reviews/ratings from the public posted onto NHS Choices or pooled from a growing number of partner review sites.   User feedback allows members of the public to post comments about their experience with individual service providers. NHS Choices is an aggregator of social care comments and through our syndication programme, any comments captured by local authorities and fed to NHS Choices are also automatically fed to the CQC, reducing management and communication time.   Opening up NHS Choices content and data through an open API and syndication programme and this is what my colleague Richard will now talk to you about.