Development and integration of BOCC Online Surveys to enable NHS Employers to create, maintain and view reports for surveys, consultations and questionnaires for their website.

https://www.nhsemployers.org/
The online surveys back-end system is not available publicly.

		Typical Survey	Creating a Survey	Survey Reporting

NHS Employers(1) 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(2) with its own director, policy board and assembly. BOCC were appointed to provide an Online Surveys system for their websites. The surveys had to meet triple-A conformance for the W3C web accessibility initiative (WAI)(3).

NHS Employers were set up by the Department of Health(4) on 1 November 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.

BOCC offered its Online Surveys(5) 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(6), which was also developed by BOCC.

The surveys administration interface makes it extremely easy to create new surveys, requiring no technical knowledge. Free sample surveys were provided, which can be copied and then edited as required. Surveys already created can also be copied and edited as required so it is extremely easy to make a similar one.

It is also possible to create multiple page surveys utilizing advanced research techniques such as piping, branching and matrix questions.

Surveys can be previewed while they are being built and published only when they are complete. A maximum number of submissions can be set so that the survey is automatically removed from the website when that number is reached.

Surveys are maintained on a real-time basis. This means that NHS Employer's can quickly make surveys available, make changes to existing surveys, activate and inactivate them. Since the created surveys are not available for use until they are published they can be created and made available for internal comments and review, allowing multiple people to work on a survey before it is approved and published.

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.

The surveys are created and maintained as part of the web-based content management system developed by BOCC to the NHS Employer's requirements.

Dynamic content management, graph creation, administration and server side processing are undertaken using Macromedia ColdFusion. Surveys and survey data is stored in a Microsoft SQL server database. Pages and surveys sent to web browsers are Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0(7) and Cascading Style Sheets 2.0(8) compliant.

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