Improving how we share our mental health information by using QR codes

If you've browsed our award-winning mental health information pages recently, you may have noticed QR codes have been added to many of them. In this blog post, the College’s webteam discuss why the change has been made – and why it’s good news for our members, and for patients.

What are QR codes and how are they used?

An example of a QR code is shown in the screenshot below, from our patient information page about Debt and mental health.

These QR codes can be scanned on any smartphone or tablet with a camera, and each code contains a link back to the page.

We know our members often share our mental health resources with their patients, and we wanted to make this process easier.

A common situation where this can help is if a College member wants to recommend a patient resource to someone in their consultation room. The patient just needs to scan the code from the psychiatrist’s computer screen or phone, to get the webpage on their phone or tablet.

They can then bookmark it or save it as a favourite, and they have the resource to refer to whenever they need.

This saves them the hassle of typing out a URL, remembering the name of a page, or needing to provide a phone number or email address. It also has the environmental benefit of avoiding the need to print the page out.

We've added QR codes to nearly 100 of our mental health information pages, across our mental illnesses and mental health problems, support, care and treatment, and young people's and children's mental health sections. We have also added them to some of our most popular translation pages, and are looking to expand this offering in the future.

This is part of our ongoing commitment to accessibility – making our content as easy to use as possible whilst taking into account the different access needs of our audiences. You can find out more on our page on web accessibility and in our equity, diversity and inclusion section.

We hope you find this feature useful. If you have any issues using this feature, or suggestions for how to improve it, please contact us at webteam@rcpsych.ac.uk.