Why are we setting up a blog?
The simple answer is to help us to engage with our users. Getting direct feedback from our users helps us to create the best service for those users, which is our ultimate aim. We want to use the blog to talk about our work, whether that is reviewing one of our elearning programmes before we update the content or discussing some new functionality that we want to add to the HEE elfh Hub, and get users to give us their opinion. Rather than assuming that we know what our users want, we want you to tell us!
Getting your input will help us to understand what topics are a priority for you, so that we can focus on tasks that you will find most useful. It will also help us make the right decisions when we are developing new things. As an example, we are considering making the dashboard customisable so we could ask if you would like the ability to tailor the dashboard by choosing what panels appear and what additional panels you might like to see.
How will it work?
One of the HEE elfh team, either one of the core team or one of the clinicians that we work with, will write a blog post on a given topic. If you want to reply, you will need to enter your name and email address – but don’t worry, your email address won’t be published – then you can write what you want. Either give us your opinion, ask a question or suggest something completely different.
We want the blog to become a space for discussion, so we will try and reply to every comment. You can then reply to our reply and so on. You can also reply to other people’s comments or replies, so it becomes a multi-threaded discussion. This is what we are hoping, anyway.
What kind of things will we post?
We will write blog posts on all sorts of topics. We are trying to get better at consulting with users, so we may ask your opinion on anything from doing elearning on a mobile phone to the label on a particular button.
As already mentioned, we will write posts discussing new functionality and discussing content but there are a host of other topics for discussion. For example, people working in the social care sector are entitled to free access to the elfh Hub but we find social care users harder to engage with than people working in acute or primary care, so we might ask you to suggest new ways for us to engage with those users. We recognise that we don’t have all the answers, so we want to tap in to your knowledge and experience.
We will also write a blog post telling you what is in any new release to the elfh Hub and alerting you to any other significant developments.
How often will we post?
It depends. This is new to us as well, so we don’t know exactly how it will pan out. We have a stack of topics that we want to write about, so we aren’t short of material. We’ll probably be more prolific in the first few months but, after the initial rush has subsided, we will still try and post new material every few weeks.
What happens next?
Go to the bottom of this blog post and leave us a comment! Do you think it is important for us to engage with users? What topics would you like to see on here? Just say hello. Whatever you have to say, we would love to hear from you. (But please keep it clean!)