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  1. Comment by Ms B posted on

    Awesome progress I'd say! The team has come a long way in just over one year. Persuading staff on the value of a particular team (and changing mindsets), in any organisation, is inevitably going to be a challenge. For DH the foundations are already laid - the Digital Health site http://digitalhealth.dh.gov.uk/ is a vehicle for evangelising the DH Comms team and can help to answer many internal questions eg. who, what, where, when, how, why?

    My 2 cents worth 🙂

  2. Comment by What I’ve been reading | DavePress posted on

    [...] Mid year review: the state of DH digital – Great honest review of activity in digital at the Dept Health [...]

  3. Comment by Danegeld links 17-23 October: at Danegeld posted on

    [...] you publish when you should be communicating? The UK Department of Health is trying to shift the balance. Instead of (or maybe as well as) an online repository of stuff, designed to be consumed offline, [...]

  4. Comment by Geoffrey Rivett posted on

    When I joined the Department in 1972, my work for the first 3 years was the introduction of real-time commuting into the NHS. Forty years later some progress has been made, but it is hardly a success story. Even simple things go wrong, for example as a historian of the health service I would like my website to link to key documents from past years. However the web addresses change, documents are deleted, or a whole site is archived when a new administration is formed wrecking dozens of hyperlinks. Thought of the doi system? Quite apart from that is the difficulty in accessing older documents that cast a long shaddow, for example the Tomlinson report on London. I have had to scan paper copies myself to make them available.

    In rushing for the future, keep the past accessible - even the parts of the past the Departmental IT folks would like to forget.

    Geoffrey Rivett, http://www.nhshistory.net.

    • Replies to Geoffrey Rivett>

      Comment by Stephen Hale posted on

      Geoffrey - thanks for your comment. I've not been in the job that long, so I can only really comment on what we've done in the last year or so, but I'll pass your comment onto others here who might add something. Since I've been here, the National Archives have been responsible for maintaining a record of government websites. People trying to access content that has been moved or removed are now automatically redirected to copies of that content on the Web Archive. As a result we now how almost zero broken links to pages on dh.gov.uk. You can find out more about the Government Web Archive here: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/. And you can find copies the DH website going back to 2007 here: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/*/http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/index.htm