The Health Care Public Relations Association (HCPRA) is pleased to announce that The Credit Valley Hospital has been awarded a first place Hygeia Award in the website category for the hospital website at www.cvh.on.ca. Webmaster, Vladimir Simic redeveloped the hospital website in April 2007 implementing a variety of new media and community health information support based on focus group and survey data collected in the Fall 2006.
The hospital made significant changes to the site to reduce, clutter, create areas of focus and position the most used content prominently on the homepage. Some of the changes included: interactive maps to support wayfinding even before people arrive at the hospital; health and wellness podcasts featuring medical and allied health professionals; video shorts about healthy lifestyles and disease prevention; wikipedia-style program and service information for quick reference; easy site navigation and right-sized web print formats.
The new site adds 40,000 “new visitors” to its already sizeable group of “regular customers” each month.
The Hygeia Awards are presented annually to recognize excellence in health care communications and to honour outstanding pieces and accomplishments across Canada. The awards program encourages Canadian health care public relations professionals to strive to meet the highest standards in their communications work, regardless of size, resources or location of their place of employment. There are nine award categories. The Hygeia Awards were recently presented at HCPRA’s annual conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
HCPRA is the only organization addressing the particular concerns of public relations professionals in Canadian health care, with over 375 members across the country.
For more information:
Jane Petricic
National Coordinator
HCPRA
613.729.2102
Email: info@hcpra.org
www.hcpra.org
