Western Cheshire NHS healthcare partners have joined forces and created a central healthcare web portal, to make finding NHS healthcare services available across Western Cheshire much more straightforward for local people and enable the organizations partners to meet the increasing challenges they face regarding public engagement and patient choice.

A shortlist of Content Management Systems providers were invited to tender for the project build, a CMS solution was specified by NHS Western Cheshire to ensure the portal would be robust and allow the five partner organisations to collaboratively maintain the site. Sitekit was chosen to deliver the project as it enabled Western Cheshire to deliver the site they wanted as easily as possible. The site also, includes integration with NHS Choices search functionality making it easy for people to find services and easy for NHS Western Cheshire to maintain. Paul Warne, Internet Technologies Manager for NHS Western Cheshire said “Modern health websites require concise accessible code, exceptional ease of use for content editors and the flexibility and support to integrate with evolving web services, Sitekit CMS ticked all of these boxes”.

Sitekit’s accredited design partner Bloom Media was selected to design the templates, NHS Western Cheshire had liked their previous NHS work such as the NHS Barnsley website design. The portal features real scenes from the Western Cheshire area, givingthe site a friendly local feel that people in the area can relate to and engage with.

The project was sponsored by NHS Western Cheshire and involved all partners across the Western Cheshire healthcare community, NHS Western Cheshire, Countess of Chester NHS Foundation Trust, Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, Cheshire West and Chester Council, Community Care Western Cheshire and West Cheshire Health Consortium.

“Delivering a website that is owned by numerous local health and social care organisations has presented its challenges. The excellent support we had from Sitekit helped us keep within our time tolerances and deliver the product we planned.” said Gill Swash, Head of Knowledge and Library Services, NHS Western Cheshire.