One intranet for 23,700 NHS staff across five hospitals

The client

Guy's and St Thomas' became one of the largest NHS trusts in the country after merging with Royal Brompton and Harefield in 2021, but it was still running two intranets built in the early 2000s. Those platforms could only be opened on a Trust device on the Trust's internal network, so porters, housekeepers, security staff and clinical staff working away from a desk were largely locked out. Torchbox rebuilt the intranet on Wagtail, starting from a platform already deployed at Cambridge University Hospitals, and worked through content modelling, auditing, drafting and a task-based information architecture.

The challenge

Running two intranets meant news had to be published twice under two different links, and departments could not easily share information with each other. Because the systems were so old, they could not be pulled up on a phone or personal device, and only worked on the Trust's internal network. Publishing news or updating a department's pages also demanded training and confidence that the legacy tools did not support. Much of the trust's content had never been organised around what staff actually needed to do.

The solution

The results

The intranet drew almost 500,000 views in its first week and around 15,000 daily users, essentially the trust's entire online staff base at any one time. The tools page became the third most visited page, giving staff a single A to Z of clinical decision support, guidance systems, email and other systems, and the health, wellbeing, discounts and support hub appears in the top 10 pages every week. The trust also built a Doctor's Hub with its chief resident doctor and medical office team. It is now working through around 20,000 items to close its final remaining legacy intranet.

Tools & stack

Original project by Torchbox ↗ — published by the delivering agency, included here as an industry reference.