At Mixd we have a long history of working with the NHS, from our early days of doing design for print projects, through to building the first ever responsive website for an NHS organisation back in 2011. So when the COVID-19 pandemic started to spread through the United Kingdom, we quickly realised how much strain it would put on the NHS and wanted to do something to help.
We had really positive feedback about the banners and alerts feature we had implemented for other NHS clients and felt there was a need for a communications platform that could quickly and easily be deployed to NHS Trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) across the country.
We immediately got to work by developing a new custom WordPress module designed to provide a centralised hub for latest news, guidance and information on the virus. We offered the module completely free of charge to all of our NHS, healthcare and public-sector clients.
The module:
- Provides a central hub for all coronavirus (COVID-19) information
- Allows promotion of key information with a Notification Banner
- Breaks information into more manageable chunks
- Integrates seamlessly with existing websites
Our team worked really hard designing and developing the Module and we rolled this out to all our clients that believed it would help their communities at this time of great need.
In addition to the work we had done on the new module, we had also escalated support for all our NHS clients to high priority – whilst this means some other clients were seeing slightly longer response times, we believed it was the right thing to do as the pressure everyone within the NHS was feeling was immense. We had also stepped up hosting monitoring and, where necessary, had been advising NHS clients when we believed we should scale-up their systems to cope with increases in traffic which, in some cases, we had seen to be up to 150% higher than normal.