Meet Your Health Hub: Lancashire’s Secret Weapon for Wellbeing!

ByKerry Booth
infographic showing a map of the area to promote the health hub

In the beginning…

The team, led by Lancashire County Council, received a grant from the Health Education England (HEE) as part of the National Health and Digital Literacy Partnership with CILIP, Libraries Connected and Arts Council England. Our proposal included the design, creation and maintenance of an online health information hub.

An online health hub – ok, what’s that?

This is the question we asked ourselves in July 2022 when the team met in person to discuss what we wanted to include in the online information hub, the design and layout of the site.

On a flipchart we mapped out the online hub:

  • Map of local health services, advice, and libraries
  • Trusted resources (NHS, Patient.co.uk and NHS patient information pages)
  • Fake news
  • Covid-19 related information
  • Links to the public library computer courses.

The hub would also contain a section for library professionals. This covered:

  • What health literacy is and why it is important?
  • What is digital literacy and why it is important?
  • Training resources from the taught session (codebreaker exercise)
  • Useful resources (recommended reads, reports, articles, and videos)
  • e-learning course (designed by us but created by the blended learning team at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals)

We discussed names for the online hub as well as a logo. The agreed name was Lancashire Health Hub (LHH) with a simple road sign as the logo for the site. We also managed to bet the NHS domain for the LHH – this helped us as we believed that the NHS domain would highlight to the public that they could trust this website.

Google Mapping…

I volunteered to use the ‘my maps’ option to create an interactive map that covered the hospitals, GP’s, pharmacies, public libraries and walk in centres across Lancashire. This was completed in November 2022 with amendments made in late 2023 and early 2024 based on feedback.

In the end…

After nearly two years of work, our Lancashire Health Hub was finally ready to launch in 2024. Everyone on the team has access to the usage statistics and we are mostly able to do any amendments ourselves. Because of our successes in saving money elsewhere in the project, we were able to pay to have the website hosted by the web designer until 2026.

You can now view the fruits of our labour here: https://lancashirehealthhub.nhs.uk/

Marketing – what do we buy?

With the money set aside for marketing and promotion, we decided the minimum we would have to purchase would be:

  • A5 double sided flyers
  • roll out banners
  • pens

To save costs, I designed a banner using Canva based on the design and colours of the website. The banner design was adapted for the A5 leaflet, so we saved more money to also purchase:

  • A4 Full Colour Posters
  • How To Guides staff version
  • How To Guides user version
  • Easy Read materials
  • Stress Balls
  • Trolley Tokens
  • Stickers & QR code (to add to each publication)
  • Takeaway cups

So, what now?

Two other independent public library authorities based in Lancashire have expressed their interest in the LHH.  The web designer is currently in the process of adding two additional pages to the LHH for Blackburn with Darwen Library and Information Service and Blackpool Libraries.

A memorandum of understanding will underpin how the health information partnership across Lancs and South Cumbria will be maintained and developed going forward. This will be reviewed every two years.

Finally, our work has also been submitted and shortlisted for the 2025 LIHNN service development award!

Kerry Booth, Assistant Librarian, University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay Foundation Trust

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