The month in COVID on nhs.uk: December 2021
My team and I look after the website’s COVID hub. We provide users with the information they need and we signpost them to COVID-19 services when they need them. Here’s what happened on nhs.uk in response to COVID-19 in December 2021.
This month we have mostly been working on COVID treatments.
The month in numbers
Each week in December, there were between 18 and 38 million visits to the COVID hub. That’s right: thirty-eight million. The most frequently viewed pages were booking a vaccination appointment, information about the booster vaccine, information about lateral flow tests, finding a walk-in vaccination site and information about vaccinations.
Overall, there were 49.7 million journeys into 1 of the 18 services that users of the COVID hub are signposted to. That’s an increase of almost 30% compared to November.
COVID treatments page
A new NHS service was launched in December: treatments for people with COVID-19 who are at highest risk of becoming seriously ill.
The treatments (including sotrovimab and molnupiravir) were already being used in hospitals. This new service saw them being rolled out in the community. In a nutshell:
- Eligible people were identified and sent a PCR test to keep at home.
- If they develop symptoms and test positive for COVID they will be contacted and assessed for treatment.
- If treatment is suitable this will be arranged. Sotrovimab is given through a drip in your arm (infusion) at a hospital or health centre. Molnupiravir comes as capsules you swallow that can be taken at home.
Setting up and running this service is a huge undertaking involving NHS England, NHS Digital, regional and local NHS organisations, GPs, Test & Trace and others.
The COVID Team’s contribution was to design and publish the new Treatments for coronavirus page. This page is linked to from emails and text messages sent to eligible people, and it contains important information such as what to do if you have not been contacted within 24 hours of a positive PCR test.
We surveyed visitors to the page twice in December. Most people (86% and 93%) told us they were able to find the information they were looking for. Those who did not find everything they were looking for wanted to know:
- if their health condition made them eligible for treatment
- who would be sending them a PCR test kit and what to do if they don’t receive one.
We have addressed these and other issues by adding this information or making it clearer.
Pregnancy risk and vaccinations
New research on the safety of the COVID vaccine for pregnant people and the risk of getting seriously ill from COVID-19 if you’re pregnant meant that we could update our pregnancy pages to strengthen key messages.
We also emphasise the risk to pregnant people and their unborn children on our pregnancy and coronavirus page.
Omicron eligibility changes
The emergence of the Omicron variant led to a speeding-up of the vaccine rollout. Multiple changes to vaccine eligibility in December meant that millions of people became eligible for a dose:
- The gap between 2nd dose and booster was shortened to 3 months from 6 months.
- People aged 30–39, and later people aged 18–29, became eligible for a booster dose.
- People with a severely weakened immune system became eligible for a booster dose (in addition to the 3rd dose they were already eligible for).
- Children aged 12–15 became eligible for a 2nd dose.
We updated eligibility information across the vaccinations topic hub and the start pages of Book a coronavirus vaccination and Find a walk-in vaccination site.
At this point I’d like to thank my colleagues on the Information Architecture team. They spotted a small issue in November whereby some users of Find a walk-in vaccination site were entering their location into the site search box instead of the ‘correct’ location search box on the 2nd screen of the service.
Sure, only a small percentage of users were doing this but the large increase in people looking to get vaccinated meant that the total number of people affected by this could have been very high — visits to this service were about 50% higher in December compared to November.
They delayed an update to the header across the whole of nhs.uk and on this specific page they reverted to an older header pattern in which the site search box was less visible. Problem solved!
It’s great when another team has your back like this. It’s one of the things I love most about working on the NHS website.
Getting a 3rd dose if you have a severely weakened immune system
To get a 3rd dose (not a booster — they’re different) at a walk-in vaccination site, people with a severely weakened immune system previously had to bring with them a referral letter from their GP or hospital specialist.
These rules changed in December. Now — at some vaccination sites only, where a specialist clinician is present — people can instead bring other evidence that they had a severely weakened immune system at the time of their 1st or 2nd dose.
We updated our page about the 3rd dose and the start page for Find a walk-in vaccination site.
These rules are complex and it’s difficult to present them in a clear and concise way for our users. This was one of the bigger challenges for our content designers in December.
New services
Two new COVID services launched in December. The hard work was done by other teams but the start pages for these services are in the COVID hub:
- Tell the NHS about vaccinations you’ve had abroad allows you to update your vaccination record with certain vaccinations you’ve received in a country outside England.
- Choose your coronavirus vaccination invitation preference allows you to opt out of receiving letters, texts, emails or calls from national NHS services to book a COVID-19 vaccination.
When to call 119
Our colleagues on the 111 Online service told us that a large number of people were calling 111 when they should be calling 119.
We noted that while most COVID services advise users to call 119 if they cannot use the online service, there was no single place to signpost people to that described all the things you could do by calling 119.
There is now: When to call 119.
Using the NHS and other health services
Finally, we updated Using the NHS and other health services to reflect the fact that more GP appointments are now face to face.
What we’re doing next month
I can’t share everything that we’re currently working on because some of it is sensitive, but here’s what I can tell you. We will:
- publish the structural changes to the vaccinations topic hub that we started looking at a few months ago
- review the effectiveness of the yellow COVID banner that’s visible across the top of most of nhs.uk
- update coronavirus treatments information as that service evolves and we get more feedback from users
- look in more detail at our content on pregnancy and coronavirus.
And we’ll no doubt be updating content as the clinical advice and health policy for COVID-19 changes.
