Why it exists
The NHS increasingly asks people to do things themselves: check their blood pressure at home, order prescriptions in the NHS App, use NHS 111 online, or help a parent with their GP services. The official information tells you what a service is. It does not always tell you how to do it well, what to do when it goes wrong, or which device to buy.
This site fills that gap. Each guide answers one practical question and ends by pointing you back to the right part of the NHS.
How it started
In 2016 Sean Key was working for an NHS clinical commissioning group (CCG), the local body that then planned and paid for health services in an area. He led its programme to get GP services online, so that patients could book appointments, order repeat prescriptions and see their records on the internet.
Getting patients to use those services was harder than it should have been. At the time there were two separate national programmes:
- GP Online Services, promoted by NHS England, which worked through the apps and websites linked to GP computer systems, such as EMIS Patient Access and TPP's app. It came with a good range of leaflets for patients, including Easy Read versions.
- The NHS App, promoted by NHS Digital. Its guides described every feature at once, but many GP practices had not switched all of those features on. Patients often read about things they could not actually do.
Both programmes relied on thousands of busy GP practices to promote them on their own websites. Practices are not marketing teams, so results were mixed, and few people used the NHS App.
That changed with COVID-19. When the NHS COVID Pass was added to the NHS App, far more people downloaded it, many of them for the first time and many needing help. Sean saw that the official material still did not explain things clearly from the patient's side, and set up this site to do that.
The patient's view, not the NHS's
Most NHS services are run separately, and each looks at a problem from its own side. Take missed appointments: hospitals and GP practices each work hard to cut the number of people who do not turn up, but each looks only at its own appointments. For a patient, simply finding out how to cancel an appointment can mean working out which organisation, which phone line or which app to use.
This site starts from the patient instead. Each guide stands back from how the NHS is organised and explains the task in the order you will actually do it.
Who it is for
The site is for UK adults looking after their own health and often someone else's too. Many readers are part of the "sandwich generation": people, most often women, who care for children and for ageing parents at the same time. They are often the ones helping a parent who is less confident online to use the NHS App, order a prescription or check their blood pressure.
Guides are written in plain English, in short steps, and are designed to work for everyone, including people using screen readers, people with learning disabilities and people for whom English is a second language. The site aims to meet the WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standard. See accessibility.
Who writes it
The site is written by Sean Key. Sean has spent 27 years working in NHS digital services and informatics, in commissioning support units, clinical commissioning groups and national programmes, including work on getting GP practices and patients using online services. He holds MSP and PRINCE2 programme management qualifications.
Sean is not a doctor or any other kind of clinician, and this site does not give medical advice. What he brings is a detailed knowledge of how NHS digital services work, from the inside, and the patient's side of using them.
Health facts on every page come from official sources such as NHS.uk and NICE, which are listed at the bottom of each guide. Every page is checked by a person against those sources, and shows the date it was checked and when its next check is due. Pages are not reviewed by a clinician, so if anything here differs from what your GP, nurse or pharmacist tells you, follow their advice.
AI tools help with research and drafting, and make the illustrations. An earlier version of this page was written as an AI-assisted interview with Sean. This version is written plainly instead. Every page is checked by a person before it is published. See how guides are written and checked.
Plans
The plan is to keep adding guides on the NHS tasks people ask about most, and to add more short videos and printable versions alongside the written guides, so people can learn in the way that suits them.
How it is funded
The site is free and has no adverts. Affiliate links appear mainly on kit guides. A few guides (at the moment, the repeat prescriptions guide) include a labelled affiliate link to a service, and those pages show a funding notice at the top. If you buy through an affiliate link, the site may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Every affiliate link is labelled where it appears, and links never change what is recommended. More about affiliate links.
Not part of the NHS
Digital Health Coach UK is independent. It is not part of, or endorsed by, the NHS. It is published by PRAG-DEL-SOL-ONE Ltd.
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