Tuesday 6 January 2009
The Big Oxford Computer Co. Ltd.

Online Surveys Case Study - NHS Employers and Confederation

Overview

NHS Employers is the employers' organisation for the NHS in England, giving employers throughout the NHS an independent voice on workforce and employment matters. NHS Employers is part of the NHS Confederation with its own director, policy board and assembly.

NHS Employers were set up by the Department of Health in 2004, with responsibility for the workforce agenda. The Department of HeaIth sets the broad framework within which NHS Employers operates, but it is employers themselves, through their own governance structure, which drives their agenda.

http://www.nhsemployers.org/

Objectives

Provision of an Online Surveys system for the NHS Confederation and Employers websites. The surveys had to meet triple-A conformance for the W3C web accessibility initiative (WAI) and provide adequate reporting capabilities.

Solution

BOCC provided our Online Surveys module as a solution to provide a high level of survey creation, management and reporting. It meets the accessibility standards when applied to suitable web pages. BOCC also created a graphical interface design for the forms. 

BOCC Online Surveys includes complex survey logic like routing and branching rules, data range and type validation, data piping and XML export. Completed surveys can optionally also be enabled to the user and administrator.

The Online Surveys module was fully integrated with the existing Content Management System, which was also developed by BOCC.

Simple reporting is available from within the administrative interface and both graphical and text-based reporting is available. Data can also be exported in common formats like CSV, XLS and XML, for integration and analysis in other systems.

Technologies 

The system utilises:

  • BOCC CMS
  • BOCC Online Surveys
  • Microsoft™ SQL Server 2005
  • Adobe® ColdFusion®
  • Microsoft™ Internet Information Server
  • Replication for file data, which then integrates with NHSE back-office membership system
  • SSL (Secure Server Certificate)
  • Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0
  • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.0 compliant