25 October 2024
As part of the website project, we regularly monitor feedback from users, both about their experience of an online process through our form feedback; and about the service received through our feedback and complaints form. From this we noticed there was a lot of negative feedback and complaints about clinical waste collections. An initial look at the online form raised some concerns and similar experiences were reported by our Contact Centre.
Clinical waste is a popular process, receiving around 480 requests per month. It affects some of our most vulnerable users. Requests are submitted by an online form which populates a database produced by our IT supplier. The team then share the database with a third-party supplier who delivers, collects and replaces clinical waste bins.
Over the years the form had been updated numerous times and had become unstable, any more updates had the potential to break the form completely.
Management of the process had passed from one service area to another.
Identifying the problems
We analysed 6 months of user feedback provided via the Council wide complaints form and feedback left at the end of the online form. We categorised the feedback to understand where the main problems were.
Missed collections
Bins were not collected / delivered on the date provided. There was no process to report missed collections leading users to use a variety of methods such as phone, face to face or complaints. This also meant that the true number of missed collections was likely to be underreported and not accurately identified.
Findability of the form
The form title was “Request a clinical waste collection.” We do not use language people are familiar with, making it difficult to find. Looking at feedback and Google Trends we know people are more likely to use the terms “sharps” and “needles.”
Issues with the online form
34% of users rated their experience of the form as poor or ok.
There was no way to request ongoing collections for permanent medical conditions.
We didn't make it clear what the form was for. Some people thought they could only use the form for the collection of clinical waste. You needed to answer half the questions before seeing you could use it to exchange and access a clinical waste bin for the first time.
People had to enter a preferred date for their collection which often resulted in an error message (which used a different date format) because they could not book a date that was 12 days after the form submission date.
There was no option to select different sized containers or receive more than one bin
The webpage had limited detail about clinical waste and some of it was confusing. For example, we did not make it clear what purple containers were on the online form or web content.
Because the online form populated a database maintained by our IT supplier there were potential cost and time delays involved in changing the online form as this would affect the fields in the database.
What we did
We held meetings with the contract owner and service to share our findings and understand the problems from their perspective.
Based on the analysis of the user feedback, we put together a list of user needs and used them to create requirements. These were used to influence the design of the online form.
One clear user need was the ability for users to let us know about missed collections. We decided to start with this while we were waiting for information from the supplier.
Our thinking was that this would provide users with a way to report missed collections, improve contract management and ensure quicker resolution of missed collections.
However, once we had the information we needed from the supplier we decided to merge the 2 forms together to make the user journey more straight forward.
Our earlier work with web forms helped us with this. We had discovered we can populate a spreadsheet within Teams that could be shared with the supplier. This meant we did not need to pay money to get the database amended and also gave us control over the data.
We used Power Automate to run every morning and remove any records with a collection date in the past so retention is dealt with automatically.
An overview of the main changes we made:
We try to make things easy so we built the date picker to automatically display the collection day based on their postcode. They can then choose from the next few available dates.
The form has been renamed to Sharps and infectious waste collection or delivery.
The webpage was redesigned, to include different types of clinical waste, reporting a missed collection and items that do not need a collection.
Users can now request up to 5 clinical waste bins and choose from 3 different sizes.
We removed the confusing content at the start of the form and on the webpage.
Results
The new form went live in May 2024 and has been used over 2,000 times.
We’ve looked at the feedback for the form comparing the 5 months before go live and the 5 months after.
Users rating the experience as positive has increased from 66% to 82%. Poor ratings have decreased from 9% to 0%.
Form feedback rating
| Before and after | Good | Okay | Bad | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before | 66% | 25% | 9% | 100% |
| After | 82% | 18% | 0% | 100% |
“Much easier and quicker than before.”
“Really good information and a very good guide to answer questions”
“Easy to understand and use”
Comments from people using the form
We no longer receive complaints about the usability and findability of the online form with complaints now mainly relating to missed collections.
Before the changes it was difficult to get an accurate idea of the volume of missed collections as there was no clear process. Now people can report missed collections, we can use this to improve service delivery.
Now the form is live, we can use real time feedback from users to help us identify any issues. Our website feedback recently showed that some people were arriving on the sharps waste collection page looking for how to report needles found in public places. We’ve added better signposting and keywords to help people find the right page.
Future improvements
As with any process there are more improvements that can be made. We are looking at pulling the data into a Power BI report to see if there are areas of the city that have regular issues with missed collections. This data can help improve supplier performance.