Primary Care Groups (PCGs) - an ideal opportunity for Intranetting?

Contributed 29 April 1999 by Dr Adrian Midgley, General Practitioner in Exeter in the UK and the "Resident Wizard" for his newly formed local Primary Care Group (PCG)

PCGs, set up in a great hurry and involving many busy and geographically separated people with a duty to communicate with the public are as close to the ideal green field site for Intranetting as one could look for. One went looking for the use of the Internet by PCGs.

Avon Health Authority (whose resident wizard is Jon Rogers, a GP in Avonmouth and medical adviser to AAH Meditel) had an early site displaying considerable promise at http://164.11.100.248/ahaweb/index.htm

However, a quick note to the webmaster revealed that somewhere in the NHS Net interface, or servers beyond it, something had gone awry. A recurring theme in NHS IT is that something is set up, and then left unattended as the individual concerned moves on. A website advising how to set up and use intranets in the NHS might be a good idea.

Searching for it though was less than effective.

The Woodsprings PCG at http://www.woodspring.com/ had a good early start, but reacted to a change in management by being removed from the web. It is now back again, and looks useful. Web pages should live forever, advice sadly neglected by a majority of NHS institutions, but clearly advocated by Jakob Nielsen in his excellent series of AlertBox columns at www.useit.com/alertbox/.

"Web pages should live forever" is at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981129.html and the column, "Top ten mistakes in Web design" at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html should be required reading for anybody wishing to publish a medical website.

The North Bristol PCG whose good fortunes include having Chris Macintosh as IT manager started a year ahead of the rest of us as a Primary Care Act Pilot. Their public site at http://www.nwbristol.org.uk/ shows only a single page, but the password protected site within at http://www.nwbristol.org.uk/ourown/ is an object lesson in how to disseminate information to which many people have a right of access, but which will vary frequently and most of which will be of no interest to any individual searcher. Chris provides suitable people in the NHS family with a password for access, and several PCG IT wizards have visited and been impressed. The presentation of a budget as a series of hypertext linked pages allowing readers to drill down from an overview to details of what has been spent and why, nearly made me look for a practice in Bristol.

Sadly, many PCG websites display clear evidence that the first flush of enthusiasm for the laudable ideals of the New NHS has already been overtaken by the old guard seizing control of information and hanging on to it.

The North Devon site at http://homepages.enterprise.net/flanker/pcg.htm is an excellent demonstration of a useful site which has failed to be provided with the information to which at least 100 000 people should have access.

The Chief Medical Officer's edict that the NHS should provide their clinicians with 15 second knowledge has sparked a discussion list on mailbase at http://www.mailbase.ac.uk with an accompanying home page, where excellent fellows like Alan Hyslop and Ben Toth can join in discussion with the ubiquitous Ahmad Risk (and at least one other ubiquitous GP) and librarians and others with an interest and expertise in delivering it, around the topic of the National Electronic Library for Health. Archives and instructions for joining the list are at http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/nelh/

I have been reviewing the pages of the UKMedW3 site now at http://www.schin.ncl.ac.uk/GPUK/UKMed3/index.htm (and which the old site will point to, soon) and found few Pharmaceutical company websites there to start with. In the years since Andrew Herd started the site the industry has begun to show a presence on the Web, but several of the companies whose sites I have subjected myself to should take note of Nielsen's AlertBox column at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981018.html

The company whose contact email returned a "not known here" message, and who have still not replied to having this faxed to their headquarters really have not yet got the message that the Web is now a way to show your company to doctors. Several companies are demonstrating that they realise the way to add value using the web to support doctors, and it is to these companies PCGs may turn for assistance, since the NHS IT establishment appears overloaded already.