Disclaimers: 1. These pages are supported by referral links, e.g. Amazon and other affiliate schemes, paying a small fee if you click on a product link 2. Digital Health Coach is not a doctor, but a digital professional with 18 years in health computing, information here is not medical advice 3. We use cookies like FaceBook and Twitter, click here for our Privacy Notice
Site Safety and Quality
In this article we cover site quality and safety, including the following topics:
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How to report safety and quality concerns
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Indemnity and Professional Registration
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How we manage content in safe manner
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Our use of machine translation
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How we manage equalities
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How we manage and respect copyright
How to report safety and quality concerns
If you have a concern about the safety or quality of the site, we would very much like to hear about it, so we can understand it, and fix it.
To contact us to raise a concern, please either tweet us at @digitalc6, you can use the button at the bottom of the page, or email digitalhealthcoachuk@gmail.com.
Our response time is typically 72 hours.
Indemnity and Professional Registration
As set out in the header on every page, DigitalHealthCoachUK is not a registered health professional, and does not carry medical indemnity.
The DigitalHealthCoachUK website, and associated social media, are owned by PRAG-DEL-SOL-ONE LTD., a registered limited company in England, which does carry generic business indemnity insurance.
How we manage content in safe manner
The approach we take in designing our content is to make existing clinical content more readily available to the public, using wrap-around non-clinical text, and then linking to NHS approved content, or other content produced by clinicians.
We do this to try and present all the relevant material available about Digital Health in structured way that supports patient journeys towards greater digital engagement and improved well-being.
Often the relevant information is spread across different part of websites such as :
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NHS Digital
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NHSX
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NHS England
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NHS.UK
This can make NHS information hard to access as complementary or competing content, e.g. for the NHS App or GP Online apps is spread across all these sites. When I've been working supporting patients getting online, this has been quite frustrating. Now that a merger has been announced between NHSx, NHS-D and NHS England hopefully this problem will resolve itself in a year or two.
We also link to relevant digital health content provided by other health bloggers, and suppliers patient-facing content, to create a compelling experience to support citizens on journeys to greater use of digital channels, and improved well-being, supported by digital tools.
We experimented with, and then stopped automatic machine translation
*Update* - we stopped translating pages as it got too expensive to pay for credits*.
Our approach is that machine translation [like Google Translate] is 'good enough' for non-clinical content, but not good enough for clinical content. Professional, or volunteer, human translation would be better, but we currently don't have the funds, or time, to support that approach.
Therefore, for a year, we have invested in automated online translation and applied it to non-clinical content. This translates the elements you can see on the page, plus the elements you might not see, but that a search engine like Google can.
In this way, we hope to be more visible to citizens who might be searching for advice online, in their own language.
We believe this approach is better than burying a translated leaflet deep in web-site under a pile of english-only content, where it is unlikely to be discovered by someone searching in their own language, e.g. Polish.
If the web page URL, title, description, text, media labels and so on are all translated, a search is more likely to find the content, and a person is more likely to stay on the page and find their way to the content [that has been translated at cost to the NHS].
The current NHS model seems very much to be to pay to translate documents, with the intention they are printed out, and handed out by services, or perhaps emailed.
Our approach is to empower citizens to find the appropriate content themselves.
Near the end of the 12 months we will review any feedback received, usage and the cost of maintaining the translated content and decide what to do next.
Currently, the patient facing pages are auto-translated into the top-20 minority community languages in England.
How we manage equalities
Our design objectives include:
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creating simple web pages using simple language that are accessible to as many people as possible
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keeping sentences both short and simple also optimises our pages for machine translation
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making our pages visible to search engines such as Google through applying Search Engine Optimisation principles
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using inclusive language and graphics, including sign-posting to easy-read content using appropriate graphics, and seeking out positive, inclusive images
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presenting professionally written easy-read content alongside other content, whilst respecting the copy-right of agencies who have produced the content
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Unfortunately some of the NHS business processes we describe can be over-complicated, this, plus adding some safety-netting content, can make some pages longer than we would like
How we manage and respect copyright
We carry out due-dilligence on the copy-right of content we share as follows:
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YouTube - we have reviewed the YouTube terms of re-use and note that if a YouTuber wants to object to content being re-used they can notify us, and we can remove the content
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Commercial websites - we review the T&Cs, these tend to be similar, i.e. companies are happy for their promotional content to be shared as long as it's not altered, it is credited, and they reserve the right to ask someone else to stop using it
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Use of NHS materials including the NHS logo - we don't use the NHS logo in our own content, it may appear as part of NHS branded content
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We don't follow the NHS design manual, to avoid confusion with an NHS-owned site, although we try to follow the design principles, where we have the technical capability and understanding.
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All of our own content is copy-right PRAG-DEL-SOL-ONE Ltd., but feel free to share our pages far and wide, so long as you don't alter the content or claim is as your own work.