6716 Creating a website for community Paediatrics in Harrow to facilitate parents/carers understand our services – A Quality Improvement Project

Objectives The internet has become an important source of information for patients/carers.¹ A website can offer easy access to information that helps involve patients and carers in their care, reduce uncertainty and improve their overall experience. We aim to create a website with information about the Community Paediatric Services in Harrow to offer parents/carers a better understanding of our role in children's health. Methods To make this website as useful and informative as possible for the parents/carers who will be the main users, we created a short questionnaire to gain their views on what the website should include. The questionnaire was distributed to all service users attending the paediatric community services between May 2023 and June 2023 and included questions to capture the demographics of the population visiting the community services such as age and language spoken at home. The rest of the questions were focused on responder's thoughts about the usefulness of the website and suggestions about the content. Results We received 31 completed questionnaires with the following results: Children's age range was 2–15 years. 55% of responders spoke English at home, 8% Tamil, 5% Hindi and 32% other languages. 56% of responders were visiting a paediatrician, 31% physiotherapist, 9% speech and language therapist, 4% occupational therapist. Overall, 81% of the responders stated that they would find access to a website with information about Harrow Community Paediatrics services to be useful and 23% stated that they had tried to search for a website prior to their appointment. Regarding the content, 65–70% would like the website to include description of the services and contact details, information about the different clinics run in the department, managing their appointments and ways to get referred to the services. Furthermore, 45–60% were interested in having access to other resources, information leaflets and learn about our roles in safeguarding and education health care plan. Lastly, 35% were interested in information regarding booking an interpreter. Conclusion Overall, the parental response to the development of a website for the Harrow community paediatric services identified an important gap as the majority of the responders felt that it would be useful to have access to a website prior to their appointment. Offering easy access to information via a Community Paediatric Website will empower patients/carers and improve their overall experience. To take forward above results we plan to make a business case to the Trust and obtain the funding to build the website. Reference Diaz JA, Griffith RA, Ng JJ, Reinert SE, Friedmann PD, Moulton AW. Patients' use of the Internet for medical information. J Gen Intern Med. 2002 Mar;17(3):180–5. doi: 10.1046/j.1525-1497.2002.10603.x. PMID: 11929503; PMCID: PMC1495021.