Report on SHA Web presence 2013

.

Our website was established in 2000 and is one of our key assets.

We decided in 2011 to move our site onto more interactive technology and we migrated the existing content into WordPress between May and November 2012.  This gave us the opportunity to introduce a live blog and other features, but it means that we are constrained by some of the characteristics of the technology.  Furthermore WordPress is a dynamic environment and we cannot assume that all its existing features will continue to operate as they do now.

Income and expenditure

We spent £1,649.66 directly on the website, (not including Internet access) of which about £1150 was development costs.  The site generated £1,293.37 in advertising revenue.

Design

The Editorial Board we appointed in June  drew up a design brief  to remedy what they considered to be the weaknesses of the website.   I have no quarrel with the aims of the brief, but I doubt whether some of them can be realised easily or at all with the resources we have available.  The design was finalised in July 2013 and given to Remeike Forbes and implemented in October by means of a new WordPress Theme which he designed – along with our wonderful new logo.

The numbers below come either from the Jetpack statistics tool or from Google Analytics. They are both imperfect, but this is the best information we have. We don’t have data from either before January 2012.

Jetpack’s report on 2013

Website activity

SHA Website visits per day
SHA Website visits per day
  • 2013: 375,511 page views,  158,180 Unique Visitors, 1.67 Pages per Visit, Average Visit Duration 00:02:01, Bounce Rate  73.5%.
  • 2012: 338,415 page views  131,303 Unique Visitors, 1.86 Pages per Visit, Average Visit Duration 00:01:53, Bounce Rate  70.65%

While these numbers look impressive 168,948 of visits were for less than 10 seconds.  Statistics for the website now are not  comparable with earlier years.  The WordPress site went live in June 2012 but was not fully populated until November 2012, so the 2012 figures include some use of the old site.

Our Google page rank of 4/10 for sochealth.co.uk (5 last year).  I’m not clear why our rank has dropped, though I was always surprised that we ever rated as high as 5. Looking at similar organisations:

We should try to get the Bounce Rate down and the visit duration up – that is to get more people to visit pages other than the one they arrived at.

Social Media

Our Facebook page now has  1757 (1488 last year) fans.  However changes to the operation of Facebook has made this much less significant.  Facebook does little to encourage voluntary on-line organisation.  While a couple of years ago there was quite a lot of activity on our FB page, and Debbie Caine managed to build 100,000 followers for her online campaign “I bet I can find 1,000,00 people who don’t want David Cameron as our PM”. Now no more than 50 people see comments on our FB page.   “I bet..” is down to 3570 members.

I think we should maintain a presence on Facebook. It’s still the third most popular site in the UK.  It’s fed from our Twitter stream.  But it isn’t worth paying much attention to because it doesn’t give us as an organisation much opportunity to make our points.  The only way it works is for individual members.

Our Twitter feed now has  2845 (1365 last year) followers, and we have made 16578 tweets.  Mostly they come from me, but Shibley makes regular contributions and Brian and Jos tweet for us occasionally.  Tweeting takes some getting used to.  It’s very lively and dynamic.  I know I annoyed some members with some of my early tweets, and I have become more careful.   Twitter offers us much more promising opportunities than Facebook. It’s possible to engage in useful debate with policy makers and to develop our reputation positively. It’s the 11th most popular site in the UK.  But it takes a lot of work.  I guess I spend about an hour a day on Twitter most days.  It is very useful at big conferences, where the organisers generally display a live stream of tweets related to the event.

External Sites

We have a small presence on YouTube, where there are 9 videos which feature on our website.  Just as with Facebook, YouTube is trying to develop itself as a social media site for individuals, which doesn’t particularly suit our needs as an organisation.  We could do more with this – including possibly moving our videos to a site which suits us better.

We have quite a substantial presence on Slideshare where there are 146 Powerpoint presentations from our conferences.  It received 20149 views in 2013, among the top 2% on the site.

We also have a presence on Issuu where there are 65 PDF files, some from our conferences, but mostly back issues of Socialism and Health.

Website content

We now have 915 Pages (mostly migrated from our old site), 679 Posts and 2,272 Comments, and we’ve had 15,703 spam comments – we pay for protection against these.

Shibley Rahman must be congratulated for his Stakhanovite efforts on the website.  He has posted 211 articles during the year, on a wide variety of subjects, which have attracted many readers.  We have been successful in attracting contributions from outside the Association.  Unsolicited contributions have appeared from Ivan Lewis MP, Dr Steve Bolsin, the whistleblower in the Bristol Royal Infirmary case (from Australia). We have persuaded some excellent writers to produce original material for us, such as Martin Routledge,and Stephanie Petrie. We had our first official post from NHS England – Vicki Hallam. I have posted or reposted some excellent material from Prof Walter Holland, Sue Marsh, Andy Burnham, Kaliya Franklin, Adrian Davis, Mark Carroll, Sanchia Alasia and Nick Krachler.  But we need to try harder to persuade our members to contribute.

Website traffic

The vast bulk of visits come from search engines:

Referrer Views
Search Engines 171,529
Twitter 25,331
Facebook 9,179
en.wikipedia.org 7,497
WordPress Dashboard 4,655

Search Terms (this is clearly only a partial list):

Search Views
the black report 6,570
black report 2,544
black report 1980 1,972
the black report 1980 1,784
beveridge report 1,527
health and social care 2013 1,167
roller coaster 808
marilyn monroe 800
acheson report 744
socialist health association 702
acheson report 1998 575
griffiths report 458
the black report summary 454
rollercoaster 434
black report summary 418
the black report 1980 summary 415
the beveridge report 398
obesity 391
inverse care law 374
the acheson report 345
inequalities in health the black report 252
griffiths report 1983 239
the black report inequalities in health 229
black report 1980 summary 221
aneurin bevan 216
the black report 1980 pdf 198
beveridge report full text 187
drugs 187
what is the black report 177
the acheson report 1998 173
health inequalities in the uk 164
target 159
the acheson report 1998 summary 142
the griffiths report 138
national insurance act 1911 132
saw palmetto 129
the black report 1980 inequalities in health 124
acheson report summary 123
aneurin bevan nhs 120
artefact explanation 118
the inverse care law 110
the black report pdf 110
artefact explanation of health inequalities 106
ely hospital 106
patient 104
tackling health inequalities 101
griffith report 100

The most viewed pages:

Title Views
The Black Report 1980 53,611
Home page / Archives 19,682
Tackling Health Inequalities in the UK 14,790
Beveridge Report 13,657
Reform of the National Health Service Chronology 12,769
Black Report 6 Explanation of Health Inequalities 12,080
Black Report 2 The Evidence of Inequalities in Health 8,577
Griffiths Report on NHS October 1983 6,003
Aneurin Bevan and the foundation of the NHS 5,929
Black Report 1 Concepts of Health and Inequality 5,500
Black Report 10 Summary and recommendations 5,223
Black Report Introduction: Inequalities and Health 4,996
History of healthcare 3,766
Health and Social Services Glossary of Acronyms 3,525
UK National Health Service law 3,477
The Inverse Care Law 3,327
Poverty and Inequality in Health 3,157
Avoiding the rollercoaster: a policy for dementia must be responsible 3,147
The privatisation of the NHS appears to be going to plan 2,625
History of the Black Report 2,537
Report on Ely Hospital 2,300
Black Report 3 Trends In Inequality Of Health 2,066
National Insurance Act 1911 2,021
What is the Socialist Health Association 2,019
The real story behind the NHS changes: The US/EU Free Trade Agreement 1,858
Income and Health 3 How income affects health 1,805
Officers of the Socialist Health Association 1,679
Labour Party Conference 2014 1,639
Blog 1,616
Is Nicholson hitting the target, but missing the point? 1,466
R. v. North and East Devon HA Ex Parte Coughlan [1999] – payment for nursing care 1,464
Obesity and Exercise 1,381
In Place of Fear A Free Health Service 1952 1,373
Competition Regulations issued under Section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act (2012) will lock CCGs into arranging all purchasing through competitive markets 1,329
NHS Privatisation: The end-game 1,328
How a fairly standard hate campaign against Labour and Andy Burnham on the NHS went so badly wrong 1,327
NEW THREAT TO THE NHS – 5 WAYS YOU CAN HELP 1,286
Bevan’s speech to the Manchester Labour rally 4 July 1948 1,223
Contact Socialist Health Association 1,212
Prescription Charges 1,211
National Health Service 1,197
Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, is ‘absolutely stunned’ at the GP Extractor Scheme, questioning its legality 1,197
Labour Health Policy 1,195
Events 1,187
Black Report 9 Policies to reduce Health Inequalities:2 a Wider Strategy 1,086
Racism in the NHS 1,080
Black Report Foreword 1,079
National Health Service Management in the 1980s 1,079
Baroness Young’s furious letter: a Conservative smear campaign against Andy Burnham unravels 1,066
A National Health Service 1,063
Dr Lucy Reynolds with a very clearly evidenced explanation of UK NHS privatisation 1,056
Interim Report on the Future Provision of Medical and Allied Services 1920 (Lord Dawson of Penn) 1,021
The Origin of the Black Report 1,010
Poor Law 1601 987
Health Inequalities 25 Years after the Black Report 971
The war over Jarman’s data 958
Home 918
Deprivation and mortality – Where’s the connection? 917
Socialist Health Association Policies 900
Black Report 4 The Evidence for Inequality in Health Service Availability and Use 895
St. Lawrence’s Hospital, Bodmin 892
Inspiration, Ideology, Evidence and the National Health Service 879
Jeremy Hunt fiddles while Rome or A&E burns, and a smear campaign continues 878
The Proposed sale of Plasma Resources UK – Just another privatisation? 849
What Labour must do to prove that the NHS is ‘safe in its hands’ 823
On NHS patient safety: the silence of the lambs is coming to an end 770
Somali people’s healthcare in Manchester NHS 745
The National Health Service Act 1977 704
Black Report 8 Policies to Reduce Inequalities in Health 685
Patient Voice? 681
Whatever Happened to the Black Report? 675
Book review: “NHS SOS”, ed. Prof Raymond Tallis and Dr Jacky Davis, Oneworld Publications (2013) 660
The “NHS prime contractor model”: why the legal liability of subcontractors matters 650
Join the Socialist Health Association 650
Black Report 5 Health Inequalities: International Comparisons 647
NHS Campaign Cartoons 607
Thank you to “Cartoon Kate” for her brilliant cartoon about the NHS privatisation 605
American Healthcare 595
A Review of the Literature: Does the Inverse Care Law Still Apply Today? 592
NHS Nursing – under staffed and under pressure 589
Splash Page 588
Health and Social Care Act 2012 580
The NHS and markets – the drugs don’t work 578
How the National Health Action Party have brought out the worst in Labour supporters for me over Eastleigh 574
Private business and the NHS 572
Fears and smears – wilful inattention from healthcare journalists? 562
3246 Needless Deaths 560
NHS for beginners 555
Annual General Meeting 2013 549
It was honour to speak to a group of suspended Doctors on the Practitioner Health Programme this morning about recovery 546
“NHS self-pay”: a marketing analysis 541
Personal Health Budgets and the left – less heat more light please 536
Socialism and Health 535
At this stage of the NHS privatisation, the pro-privatisation lobbies get more desperate 534
‘Whole-Person Care’ A One Nation approach to health and care for the 21st Century 532
Please Help Lord Hunt Win His Section 75 Prayer Debate 532
Child Poverty and Health 523
The role of the private sector in the NHS 2012 506
The Francis Report: a personal note. Sir David Nicholson must go. 503
Lyme Disease – Patients Languish while Facts are Buried 501