Archive for November, 2008

Wandsworth Primary Care Trust wants your views for a consultation it is launching on health services in South Wandsworth (covering Balham, Bedford, Earlsfield, Furzedown, Graveney, Nightingale, Southfields, Tooting and the southern half of Wandsworth Common electoral wards).

If you fill in the questionnaire on the website – http://www.wandsworth-pct.nhs.uk/SouthWandsworth/default.asp – you have a chance of winning one of three £100 shopping vouchers. The survey will ask you about how you use health services in Wandsworth and what you think of some aspect of the service.

The consultation runs up till 12th December 2008 and is the first stage in a big exercise to ask you what you want to see in your health service over the next 5 to 10 years.

The Wandsworth LINk will be submitting its views to this exercise and if you want to get in touch with us as well with your views we will be pleased to hear them (click here for how to contact Wandsworth LINk).

Back in May we launched www.wandsworthlink.org.uk very quickly so that it was ready for its primary role – to encourage people to sign up and register with Wandsworth LINk.

Once the dust had settled, this gave us more time to develop the website to provide other more helpful features, for example information and resources for individuals, groups and organisations in Wandsworth. So in August a new version of the site was launched.

The new version is a lot different to “version 1″ and offers more services. So we thought it was worth asking:

• What do you think of the new site?
• Is it easy to find your way around?
• Is it easy to read? Clearly written?
• What information do you want to see?
• Is anything missing now?

We asked these questions earlier this summer and Dan and Hew at Surveylab have been working on the changes to make the website more easy to use. The feedback they received and their own observations brought up a number of issues. Examples were

1. Finding your way around – some users thought they went round and round in circles and never quite found what they wanted. Part of the reason for this was that there was not very much content on the site or consisted of much the same stuff (usually meeting minutes) found through different parts of the website.
2. The way we described things was not as helpful as it could have been.
3. Others found it difficult to read – for example not enough contrast between grey text on white background or default font size too small.

So we have changed the way things are labelled, the colours and increased the default text size (we have inserted a control to change the text size at the top of the page too). Also links that you click on to go somewhere else are always blue and underlined (except for the menu at the top and bottom of every page).

We also wanted to broaden the site out and think about putting more helpful information on the site such as a diary of events. This will go up soon.

So all that is now done but of course the site will continue to develop to keep up with the way the LINk is developing in response to your needs and views. Keep telling us what you think. We promise to keep listening.

Next week’s Interim Executive meeting agenda and supporting documents are now available for download. Click here to view the agenda and files (for Monday 17th November 08 at Earlsfield Library).

You can also find this page by clicking on the Resources menu option at the top of the page, then click on ‘LINk Meeting Minutes’.