Your practice website: the first point of contact for many patients
Your practice website holds a wealth of useful links and services that patients may need and can benefit from. Patients should be encouraged to visit your website to help them understand what services are available to them and, if needed, to enable them to help themselves before contacting the practice to seek a face to face appointment with their GP.
It is worth checking what your practice website looks like on a mobile device, as 2 out of every 3 eConsult are carried out on a mobile or tablet.
eConsult website banner
Patients access eConsult via your practice website, so it is important that the eConsult banner is well placed. It should be easy and obvious to find on the landing page. Including the patient-facing video also helps patients understand how it works.
We recommend adding additional smaller banners to other frequently visited or related pages, such as the ‘Results’, ‘Appointments’, ‘Online services’ and ‘Contact us’ pages.
Below you’ll find what your eConsult banner will look like. Using the eConsult Dynamic Overlay banner below means that you do not need to move information around on your website to make space:
Click here to see what this looks like on a live site.
Please speak with your Operations Executive who can provide the code to add to your site.
If eConsult hasn’t launched yet for your practice, the banner will still work – it will display a “Coming soon” message until we make your system ‘Live’.
You can also customise your dynamic banner, click here for details.
Add banners to other areas of your website
You can add eConsult banners to other pages of your website too. For example, add an admin banner to your administrative page to let patients know they can use eConsult for admin needs. Or, you can add a banner to your paediatric webpage to let parents know there are paediatric eConsults available at your practice.
Download all the banners you need here. Click here for more banners.
Improving your practice website
Some of the feedback we get from patients is ‘how hard it can be to find information on practice websites’. Below are our top three suggestions for good website design. All are designed to keep your patients online for as long as possible, instead of calling the practice with any and all queries.
Put a link to eConsult on key pages
Make sure it’s easy for patients to find the information that they might otherwise call the practice for. We recommend adding the eConsult banner to your homepage, as well as linking specific templates on other pages such as Travel, Paediatric and Admin requests. We have different templates for these pages that you can access here. If you need any suggestion on pages to add a banner to please email: practice.support@webgp.com. Or take a look at a practice already doing this: Castle Point Practice
Top tip: Have a new member of staff search for something on your website to test its ease of access.
Drive patients online using the dynamic banner
A prominent eConsult banner will make it easy for patients to access the platform. Our dynamic banner pops up as soon as a user lands on the website meaning it is the first thing patients see.
Encourage an online interaction, not a call
Remove your practice phone number from your website’s home page (and your Google business account, if you’re feeling brave) and move it to the ‘Contact us’ section. This will reduce the number of people calling straight after having searched for your practice, and drive people onto your website.
You can use https://ready.mobi/ to see how your website looks on both desktops and different mobile devices, as well as how it compares to other practices.
If you need some advice on who can help you redesign your website, we like these from Tree View Designs (http://https://treeviewdesigns.co.uk/):
- https://www.oaklandshealthcentre.com/
- https://www.rollemedicalpartnership.co.uk/
- https://www.lawmedicalgrouppractice.co.uk/
Videos
We have a number of videos that you can use to promote to patients on how eConsult works, the benefits and how they would eConsult.