The month in COVID on nhs.uk: June 2022

3 min readJul 20, 2022

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 June 2022.

The month in numbers

On average, there were about 364,000 visits a day to the COVID hub. The most frequently viewed pages were booking a vaccination appointment, what to do if you have COVID, getting an NHS COVID Pass, finding a walk-in vaccination site and getting free NHS COVID tests.

Overall, there were 4.3 million journeys into 1 of the 18 services that users of the COVID hub are signposted to. That’s a fair bit lower than the number of journeys in May.

Retiring old COVID content

Last month I explained how there were hundreds of pages across nhs.uk on which there were COVID messages. We organised them into 14 groups, prioritised the groups and started work on reviewing those messages to see if they were still needed.

In June alone the team reviewed COVID messages on 313 pages. After checking in with policy and clinical colleagues, almost all messages were removed.

On Going into hospital as a patient we retained some content about wearing face coverings in the main page content and removed the big yellow box.

Warning box telling people that if they are going into hospital they will need to wear a face covering and they may need to self-isolate and/or test beforehand.

On the contraception pages we removed the warning that it might take longer than normal to get contraception.

Warning box telling people to only attend their GP surgery or sexual health clinic in person if they’ve been told to, and that it might take longer to get contraception than usual.

On How to access NHS services in England if you are visiting from abroad we merged the main messages into the page’s content.

Warning box saying that overseas visitors to England (including anyone living in the UK without permission) will not be charged for COVID tests, treatments or vaccinations.

And on 188 separate conditions pages we removed this message saying that it was important to get help from your GP if you needed it. None of us ever liked this message, we were happy to see it go.

Screenshot of text saying that it’s important to get help from your GP if you need it, and details of how to contact your GP surgery.

We held a retro

A group of 20+ content designers, user researchers, delivery managers, product managers and senior leaders reflected on how we had responded on nhs.uk to COVID over the past 2.5 years.

The aim of this was to understand what went well and what — with hindsight — we would have done differently. There were lessons learned that we could apply immediately, and other lessons for future colleagues responding to another health emergency.

I’ll share some of the key messages in a future blog post.

Other changes to nhs.uk COVID content

Eligibility for a 3rd dose of the vaccine was expanded to include children aged 5–11 with a severely weakened immune system.
A survey on the Who is at high risk page told us that some people were struggling to find out how to access free tests so we added a link to this information.
We updated the COVID treatments page with new eligibility criteria and some other small edits.

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:

review most of the remaining 116 nhs.uk pages with COVID messages
plan a wide-ranging review of all content in the COVID hub
write up the recommendations from the retro.