The CareSearch portal: What lies beneath, what lies ahead
A blog post by Professor Jennifer Tieman, CareSearch Director, College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Flinders University
CareSearch has been supporting health professionals, individuals, and families affected by the need for palliative care with trustworthy information and resources for over ten years. Fundamental to our work has been the concept of evidence, which can be used to inform practice and enable decision-making and choice. During this time, we have grown the content available on the website and expanded ways of communicating with our different users. However, as websites mature and grow, some parts of the website become less useful, and content and formats can become outdated. The needs and profile of users can also change.
During 2017-2020 we worked closely with different user groups to understand how they look for, use, and navigate to palliative care information and resources. The Engagement Project was critical in developing new ideas about meaningful engagement and knowledge transfer in the digital environment. We also looked at what were the most and least visited pages in the website, the importance of the page’s content, and how people were finding our pages. What was clear from this work was three things:
- CareSearch has great content but it can be hard to navigate
- Evidence is critical to our role
- Users have very different information needs and different digital capabilities
We are now reorganising the CareSearch website to make it easier for people to find information more easily and to offer more choice in content and formats of information.
This project will be completed in two major phases and for three months there will be two CareSearch websites – the new one being CareSearchCommunity, which will stand alongside most of the current CareSearch website.
CareSearchCommunity will launch in August 2021 and will introduce new consumer-oriented content alongside a refreshed section for patients, carers, and family.
At the end of October, we will finish bringing across the existing Health Professional and Evidence resources to join with CareSearchCommunity to complete the new CareSearch portal. Then in 2022 we will launch a re-structured and enhanced Evidence Centre to complete the reorganisation.
In designing a new portal, we are not losing our evidence and practice resources but rebuilding a stronger and more intuitive resource. The content we are creating and updating reflects the strong quality processes that characterise CareSearch activities. The first step in this process was reviewing and articulating our quality approach to be able to transparently describe how we go about our business.
We also examined developments in web technology that could strengthen the utility of the website for web visitors. We addressed the issue of accessibility compliance to ensure that our resource can be used by as many users as possible. Embedded responsive design means that content will automatically configure for different devices, so you can view content on your phone while on the train going to work, not just when you are at your computer. We are also building in ways for people to give us feedback and evaluation metrics to help us understand what works and how people use our site.
The work has been challenging and we have been grateful for the generous contributions of our national advisory group, expert panels, user testers and the many people who have provided ideas, suggestions, and feedback. We are looking forward to continuing the relationship and to continuing to improve CareSearch to meet the needs of those needing palliative care, those providing palliative care, and those enabling care delivery.
Professor Jennifer Tieman, CareSearch Director, College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Flinders University