by Dr Adrian Midgley
dr.midgley (at) homefieldsurgery dot nhs dot uk
Do you think http://primary.exeter.nhs.ukis an odd address?
If so, follow one of your bookmarks to an NHS website from a few years ago, one with IMG or PCG in the domain name. Chances are it won't be there.
On the web, pages should live forever. As time goes on the content of the page may change to reflect new realities, but if what you put up was useful enough for someone to bookmark or a search engine to index, then there should always be a page there when the link is followed, even if it says "please alter your bookmark, click here if you are not immediately transferred to the corresponding page of the new trust."
So how to make that extra work or unneeded irritation less likely?
The answer is to pick generic descriptive names for websites. This will be no shock to doctors, who find "discolouration in the flank indicating pancreatitis" rather more useful than "Elston Grey- Turner's Sign", nor to prescribing committees and the like who tell us that the NHS will gain from the use of generic names for drugs rather than brandnames.
Exeter has been here for a while, and looks like staying. People in Exeter seem likely to receive some care called Primary for further into the future than I can see. Hence the choice. Indeed, the top and second level domains may be less durable than the machine and domain, but even if UK becomes England, we will expect to have some sort of nations' health service.
So you could navigate among primary, secondary, tertiary, from medical to surgical and admin to pathology for many years. Community and hospital are persistent concepts and often buildings, but trusts and authorities are evanescent and not good names for the web. If you must use the latter, use them as aliases for the underlying conceptual domain names and pass on ownership as times change.
Jakob Nielsen's alertbox article: Web pages should live forever. And why. www.useit.com/alertbox/981129.html
First published in Inform - the NHSIA house newspaper