Healthwatch Manchester: Better Practice? GP Practice website reviews
This report aims to present the findings and recommendations of a comparative review of Manchester’s GP Practice websites. These were reviewed in 2021 and then again in 2023. This report provides comparative scoring from 73 practice websites who existed at the time of our original review in 2021.
After completing our reviews, we found that the key areas regarding accessibility i.e. making an appointment and navigating around the system showed a decrease in scoring. Moreover, Statutory / Contractual compliance remain low and compliance with the NHS Accessible Information Standard remains low overall.
Healthwatch Manchester recommends that GP practices must invest time and resources in improving their websites in the following areas:
- Access to information for infection control, health and wellbeing and other language availability
- Ease of navigation around the system including making and cancelling appointments
- Compliance with the NHS Accessible Information Standard
- Compliance with all other statutory and contractual compliance e.g. an active Patient Participation Group
Healthwatch Manchester would like to thank each practice that responded to our email regarding its individual report as well as our volunteers and members of our Citizens Reading Panel who helped with the production of this report.