Ever since the coronavirus pandemic hit the nation, hundreds of thousands of people have been turning to the NHS website to find out more about the virus, what the symptoms are and how to deal with the illness.

But guidance and advice changes rapidly and it takes time and resource to stay up-to-date. We also knew that people were seeking health information in many places other than the NHS website (NHS.uk).

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, we ensured that as many people as possible could find the right health information wherever they looked by syndicating NHS website content to over 2,000 users, who publish it in other websites and apps.

We quickly realised that demand was escalating on a huge scale as coronavirus hit us, so our team decided to create a group of tools to help users to quickly and easily reuse NHS.uk coronavirus content, and keep that content automatically updated.

We want the clinically approved information on the NHS website to be disseminated as widely as possible so we have taken the step of allowing our users to bypass the usual sign-up process – although we do expect them to tell us how they are using the content.

Here is a description of those tools:

Content accessed through the API is automatically updated when changes are made on the NHS website.

They told us that the widget "looks great on our website. It’s handy that we can adjust the size of the widget too, so it better fits with the other contents on our landing page".

Another organisation, Machew LLP, a company that specialises in managing websites including several school websites, found that their customers "were very happy to have official, up-to-date information on their websites, and know that the NHS widget would automatically update as the COVID-19 situation changes".

Mumsnet is probably one of the bigger, more well-known sites that are syndicating copy from the NHS website. It’s good to know that the information we are providing and they are using is as accurate as we can make it at any given time.