Health Secretary Wes Streeting has launched a new public consultation website to help guide and shape the future of our NHS. The platform, a subdomain from the NHS website (change.nhs.uk), is designed to allow members of the public to voice their ideas for improving the overall service – so far over 27,000 submissions have been received.
Unlike our fantastic Healthcomms team, I am not a healthcare specialist, so I wanted to assess the site purely as a digital communications tool – something that we at PLMR Digital know rather a lot about…
The moment the site launched it trended in the UK on X/Twitter – a good sign in some ways but I imagine a concern for those running the platform. Inevitably, the site has already received its fair share of Boaty McBoatface-style submissions, with Streeting himself clearly amused by the suggestion he should be fired out of a cannon to raise money for the National Health. But like Matt Hancock’s much mocked Hancock App (RIP), I think this Wes-site (sorry) has the potential to become a surprising success.
Open consultation platforms like this work best when they are perfectly calibrated for the free exchange of ideas without being too open to abuse or mockery. Too strictly controlled and the platform becomes dry and unrepresentative of the majority opinion, only used by a few industry wonks and anoraks who can dominate the space with a specific agenda. Too open and the platform becomes a wild west where trolling and other grizzly internet behaviours dominate – this instantly makes the consultation itself look like a joke and reduces its effectiveness.
Over the last few days, it appears the Change the NHS microsite has toed that line well. There are serious, well-researched and thoughtful contributions from patients, doctors, community groups and industry in abundance, with enough silly suggestions to prove that the Great British public haven’t been frozen out of the site entirely.
The mechanism for showing support via a thumbs up/thumbs down system is tried and tested by Reddit and other platforms (although hiding dislikes might help to reduce “idea bombing“) and the navigation available is simple and easy to use.
At the moment ideas appear to be ordered by the date of submission (with the oldest submissions receiving a prominent first page spot) – in order to avoid any suggestion of bias it would be a good idea to put all submissions in a random order, so every page load presents the user with a completely new crop of submissions to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. When dealing with public submissions which have such enormous political weight to them, looking like you are giving all submissions an equal opportunity to find their supporters will be vital to maintaining trust that this consultation is being pursued in an even-handed and unbiased manner.
Ultimately, beyond a few UI/UX tweaks I would love to make, the site is more or less what one would hope to see in a modern consultation platform. It will be interesting to see whether this kind of true and open consultation, which is so commonplace at the local government and planning level, can successfully scale for Westminster politics.
Without much fanfare, Britain has actually pioneered many successful experiments in digital democracy and government access. GOV.UK is a triumph and has been copied across the world, and Parliament’s e-petitions website has helped bring many vital topics to the forefront of public debate. I do sincerely hope that Streeting’s gamble here pays off, and not just for the sake of our NHS; I hope its success gives other Ministers the confidence to experiment more with digital communications tools and look at what else is available to trial and test on the modern web.
