Help

Welcome to the online help section. This section will grow to cover every aspect of the use of this site and will include FAQs covering frequently encountered problems and their solutions. We welcome your feedback. The more information you provide, the more we can use it to improve the site and the less help we will need to provide here.

Not every problem you experience will be our fault. User settings, firewalls, the peculiarities of different software and user error may all be factors. Nevertheless, we will make every reasonable effort to help you resolve these difficulties.

If the answer you are seeking is not here, please contact our web team.

Registration & Login

You are not required to register in order to use the open access material included on the NHS PCC website. However, to access subscriber content and register for subscriber only events you need to belong to a subscribing PCT and re-register your details using the following link: www.pcc.nhs.uk/profile.php. If you do not yet have an account with us, then please register an account now.

During registration, you will be asked to provide your name; job title; line manager details; organisation; areas of interest; email address, and a password. We use this information for the following purposes:

1. to personalise the information available to you, e.g. providing access for eligible users to restricted content and discussion forums
2. to maintain an up-to-date database of contacts for NHS PCC
3. to allow extra administrative facilities (such as editing page content) to authorised users.

Information in your registration profile can also be used within the online events booking system. In that case, you may be asked to supplement your profile with further contact details (address, telephone number, and fax number) and details of any special dietary or other requirements that you wish to tell us about. Your booking history is recorded against both your profile and aggregated against your PCT profile.

The information in your online profile (name, job title, email address, organisation, and contact details) would never be shared outside the "NHS family" without your express prior approval.

Within NHS PCC your information may be used as described earlier in this statement - for maintenance of our contacts database, for communicating with colleagues, and for administration of events. Occasionally, we may share contact data with other teams in the "NHS family" where this supports our work.

Your contact details will never be released outside the "NHS family" without your explicit prior consent.

If you are having problems logging in, there is a login help link at the login screen. Clicking this will ask you for the email address you registered with and send an email to it containing the password reminder you set at registration. If the password reminder doesn't help, there will be a link within the email to have a new password generated and sent to you.

Accessing and downloading documents

Downloadable documents on the NHS PCC site are provided in a variety of formats. The most common are PDF (.pdf), Word (.doc), Powerpoint (.ppt or .pps) and Excel (.xls). Most computers already have the software to read these file formats. If you do not have Adobe Reader (for reading PDF files) you can download it here.

NHS PCC sometimes provides documents in compressed (zip) format. This could be to speed up downloads by compressing the document and decreasing its file size, or it could be to make sure a collection of documents are always bundled together. Zip files cannot be opened within your Internet browser, they have to be saved to your computer before you can extract the files.

PDF

Many documents on the site are made available in Portable Document Format (PDF). You might require a separate piece of software to enable you to read these documents; this can be obtained directly from Adobe Systems as a free download.

There are many different versions of the PDF standard, and not all will work with all readers: if you experience problems accessing one of the PDF documents on the site then:

• Ensure that you have the correct address for the document
• Ensure that you have an up-to-date version of the reader software

If you have problems downloading a copy of a PDF file, but you are able to download other documents, then try right-clicking on the link and selecting 'Save' or 'Save as'.

Zip

Zip files are collections of other files compressed together to make their overall size smaller.  This allows for faster download, and for more convenient handling of large numbers of related documents.

Occasionally you might encounter difficulties downloading Zip files to your computer, this will usually happen when using older browsers.  You can overcome most such difficulties by right-clicking links to Zip files and selecting 'Save target as', 'Save shortcut as' or a similar menu item.  This will allow you to download the Zip file to your computer from where you will be able to open the Zip file and access the documents that it contains.

Documents containing macros

Some documents contain dynamic elements - 'Macros' - which control the way that they display on-screen or when printed. Sometimes these documents will be loaded with these macros disabled, which will cause parts of the document not to work, and could affect the way that the document looks.

In Excel: Excel will usually warn you if it has disabled macros, and this warning will give instructions on how to enable them.

If Excel does not display a warning, but the document does not act as expected, then it could still be that macros are disabled. Try the following:

• Go to the Tools menu
• Select Options
• In the dialog box that appears, select the Security tab
• Select Macro Security
• Select Medium from the list of security levels
• Select OK to close the dialog, and OK to close the Options dialog

Search

The search facility within the site catalogues the resources available via the site. You can search on particular keywords, and you can select one or more categories in order to narrow your search further.

Why can't I find what I want?

In order to make best use of the search, try to use keywords which apply to the resource that you're looking for, and which do not apply to other resources - this will enable the system to return fewer, but more useful links to you. If you use a common term, such as 'PCC', then many documents will contain this and could be returned; if you use a term that doesn't appear in the resource that you seek (for example if you misspell a keyword) then the system is unlikely to be able to return useful results.

Keyword searching

Enter one or more keywords, separated by spaces. You can choose to search for any of your keywords (in which case matches will contain one or more of your keywords), for all of your keywords (in which case matches will contain all of your keywords somewhere within them, but not necessarily one after the other), or for the exact phrase that you've entered (returning only those matches that contain precisely the phrase that you've entered).

Note that searching is not case-sensitive. If your search contains punctuation and does not return the results that you'd hoped, it can sometimes be worth trying an identical search without that punctuation.

Search within a category

You can narrow your search to one or more categories used within the site; simply highlight those you wish to search within (hold 'Ctrl' and click categories to select more than one; hold 'Ctrl' and click selected categories to deselect them). If you wish to search within a category without entering any keywords, simply select your category/categories and click any of the 'search' buttons.