Help patients recognise the right clinic service

What this means for your practice

Explain what the service covers and the choice the visitor needs to make. Ask the responsible clinical team to approve suitability information rather than inventing eligibility rules.

A practical example

For example, a clinic offering a first assessment and ongoing reviews can describe the first-contact route clearly, then link existing patients to review information. Ask your writer to explain that distinction in a short opening paragraph and ask the service lead to check its meaning. Keep a suitable contact route nearby for visitors whose circumstances do not fit the examples. The result should feel like a helpful introduction to the practice, with enough detail to support a sensible next step.

Keep the page useful for someone arriving directly from a search result. They may not have read your homepage or know the practice's terminology. The opening should identify the service and provider, with enough context to make the next step understandable without a tour of the whole website.

Make this improvement work

Give the writer a brief describing the person arriving at this page and what they already know. Someone referred by another professional may recognise a service name, while someone searching independently may only recognise their practical question. The opening can serve both by explaining the service without making an individual suitability judgement. Ask the service lead which statements need specialist checking and record unanswered questions before drafting. Review the page's introduction separately from its detailed sections. If a reader cannot identify the offer from the opening, adding more background lower down is unlikely to solve that first uncertainty.

How to check the result

Record enquiries routed to the wrong service.