The challenge

Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust is a major acute trust in Kent, operating across three hospital sites and multiple satellite locations with a workforce of around 8,000. The Trust delivers services spanning maternity care, post-acute treatment and end-of-life care to a diverse patient population.

By 2023, MTW’s governance infrastructure had become increasingly fragmented. Critical processes were spread across multiple standalone platforms, manual workflows and locally held spreadsheets — an arrangement that introduced both inefficiency and risk. Carrie Carpenter, Trust Patient Safety Specialist, described the vulnerability this created: “We had spreadsheets for areas like safeguarding, and realized just how easily someone could accidentally delete that critical data.”

The Trust’s long-standing Datix system had grown unwieldy over the years. Without a formal change control process, it had accumulated redundant fields and overlapping categories that made it difficult to use and harder still to report from. As Carrie put it: “We’d inherited a system filled with unnecessary fields and extra categories built up over time.” Extracting meaningful data required manual effort, and the outputs were often slow to produce and unreliable in quality.

MTW recognised it needed to bring all of its governance activity under a single roof — improving data quality, strengthening oversight and creating the foundation for a more proactive, insight-led approach to patient safety and compliance.

The solution

MTW selected Ideagen Healthcare Guardian and adopted modules covering patient safety, quality assurance, compliance, risk and safeguarding — consolidating what had previously been managed across disconnected systems and spreadsheets into a single, configurable platform.

The Trust took full advantage of the platform’s customisation capabilities, designing bespoke forms, categories and dashboards tailored to its specific operational needs. Implementation was structured and deliberate, even under time and resource constraints, with the team taking a phased approach to building out the system’s reporting and visualisation layers.

Real-time dashboards became central to the new way of working. Carrie acknowledged the scale of ambition: “We went dashboard crazy. But the oversight we now have is incredible.” A dedicated maternity dashboard was developed in response to a challenging CQC inspection, giving the Trust live visibility of key indicators and supporting ongoing compliance. A separate care coordination dashboard brought together governance insights and patient flow data, helping to inform bed management and placement decisions.

MTW also introduced a self-reporting mechanism for PALS cases, enabling patients to log concerns directly into the system through web links or QR codes. This reduced administrative handling while simultaneously improving the quality of data captured — including demographic information that supports the Trust’s work on health inequalities. Carrie noted: “It reduces the burden on admin staff and improves data capture.” The Trust plans to extend this self-logging capability to formal complaints.

The results

Significant uplift in incident reporting

Monthly incident reports rose from 1,300 to more than 2,000 — a 54% increase that reflects improved system usability and stronger staff engagement with the reporting process rather than a rise in incidents themselves.

Cleaner data, sharper insight

Streamlined forms and rationalised categories have markedly improved data quality, enabling the Trust to draw actionable conclusions from its governance information. Real-time dashboards have replaced manual reporting processes, saving hours each month and making governance meetings more productive and evidence-based.

Reduced administrative burden

Automation of PALS case logging and complaints data collection has freed up administrative capacity, while the self-service reporting model gives teams and leadership direct access to the metrics that matter. As Kate noted: “Dashboards are key to accessibility. Our focus at the moment is building these to meet the needs of teams and the trust.”

National recognition

MTW’s innovative use of the platform earned the Trust shortlisting for two HSJ Patient Safety Awards, recognising its achievements in governance transformation and reporting.

What comes next

With the core platform embedded, MTW is now focused on extending its capabilities further. Priorities include launching self-logging for formal complaints, refining complaint coding to support thematic analysis, developing new dashboards for emerging priorities, and using demographic data captured through PALS and complaints to better understand and address health inequalities across its patient population.