Wikipedia:WikiProject National Health Service/Project overview

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Contents

[edit] Scope

[edit] What and why

The British National Health Service (NHS) is one of the largest healthcare organisations in the world. Its function is to provide a complete range of medical services 'free at the point of delivery' to every citizen of the United Kingdom. Employing over 1.3m people and with an annual budget of about £80 billion, it is an essential part of the British way of life and consistently a prime area of media attention and political contention.

Webpages relating to the NHS (including official pages) are often confusing, rarely linked intelligently to each other, and do not give a useful overview to the layman.

It is therefore highly desirable that the NHS should be explained and described as accurately as possible in Wikipedia.

[edit] The NHS in Wikipedia

[edit] What's wrong

A myriad of articles exists in Wikipedia about different aspects of the NHS. Some, but by no means all, of these are listed in Category:National Health Service. There is no clear structure in which these articles are embedded. (There is also a lack of structure with healthcare topics that go beyond the boundaries of the NHS: Category:Healthcare in the United Kingdom.)

The following problems (and the list is by no means comprehensive) are evident amongst some (or in some cases most) of the existing articles:

  • they are poorly structured
  • they are stubs
  • they are mutually inconsistent
  • they do not provide links to other appropriate articles
  • written perhaps by professionals, they do not provide enough context or explanation for the outsider - and may contain significant professional or political POV
  • many topics and issues are not covered at all
  • there is confusion about the different services in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

[edit] What would be better

This means it is difficult for the reader to develop a clear picture of this highly complex organisation; for the NHS has virtually a culture of its own. In sum, Wikipedia articles relating to the NHS should be able to explain, inter alia:

  • its history
  • its functions
  • its services
  • its structure
  • its management
  • its finance
  • its staffing
  • its politics
  • its relationships with medical bodies
  • its clinical governance
  • its corporate governance
  • differing arrangements in different parts of the UK

[edit] Article Goals

To help in maintaining a standard across NHS articles, we have listed a set of goals you should be aiming for. Each article should eventually be:

  • accurate
  • written from a neutral point of view
  • comprehensive
  • structured
  • well written
  • mutually consistent
  • clearly interrelated
  • supported by sufficient context

However, it will likely take us some time to reach these goals with every article, so don't worry if you can't meet all of them right away. Remember though that even the shortest stub article should be accurate and maintain a neutral point of view.

[edit] Related Projects and Sister pages

[edit] Related Projects

[edit] Related pages in Sister projects

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