Connecting 23,700 NHS staff with one Intranet

In 2021, Guy's and St Thomas' merged with Royal Brompton and Harefield. The consequence of that merger was that we became one of the largest NHS trusts in the country, but we were still operating across two legacy intranets that had both been developed in the early 2000s.

If we needed to share important news, we had to publish it across both intranets using two different links. If departments wanted to share information with each other, the intranet couldn't help them. And because our intranets were so old, colleagues on their feet and not at a desk, couldn't pull them up on a phone or personal device. You had to be on a Trust device, and on the Trust’s internal network, which meant porters, housekeepers, security staff, clinical staff and resident doctors rotating between wards, couldn't easily access information.

There were layers of obstruction, and we needed a single, consistent experience across the entire organisation.

When we were evaluating platforms, we knew we wanted to stay true to our commitment to open source. The NHS has a strategic interest in open source technology and in keeping its digital infrastructure out of the hands of proprietary vendors.

We were looking for a product which was trusted, worked at scale, and had been deployed across other NHS trusts and digital presences. A bonus was seeing an editor experience in action — the live preview panel, the intuitive interface, the way it was clearly designed for people who use a CMS as a side part of their job, not their whole job. For our staff who need to publish news articles or update their department's pages without becoming power users, that mattered enormously. One of our biggest barriers to a successful intranet has always been training and confidence. Wagtail made that barrier much lower.

One of the things that improved our expected experience was how quickly we had something real to work with. Because we were using a platform which had already been developed and deployed at Cambridge University Hospitals, we were essentially spinning up a tested, proven system from day one. That gave us the bones of something that worked, and freed us to focus on what was genuinely specific to us.

We also made a decision early on that I'd encourage any trust embarking on a similar project to consider: we didn't have to turn one intranet off and turn the new one on on the same day. That sounds obvious, but in digital projects it often doesn't feel like an option. Speaking to another Trust, who were in the middle of merging three intranets, opened our eyes to a phased approach, and it changed everything about how we planned the work.

From June to November, we ran a series of focused two-week sprints: content modelling, auditing and prioritisation, drafting, build, and then sign-off workshops with individual teams. Rather than asking very busy clinical staff to sit through weeks of back-and-forth, we did the hard work ourselves — auditing, structuring, drafting — and then came to them with a rebuilt section and asked: what needs to change? Often we could do it live in the room in a day, sometimes half a day, sometimes an hour.

We also used AI tools throughout the auditing process, which helped us move through thousands of pages at a pace that would otherwise have been impossible. We're now exploring what a broader agent capability might look like for the trust.

One thing I'm proud of is how we approached information architecture. We didn't use departments as the organising principle, we built around tasks, topics, themes, behaviour, and what makes sense to someone on their first day, who doesn't yet know the name of the team responsible for the thing they're looking for. That was a significant piece of work, and it's made a real difference to how staff navigate the site.

We really wanted to do user research with our staff, but asking time-poor clinical staff to book something in their diary when they needed to be on the floor simply wasn't realistic.

We had an AI-powered interview tool built specifically for us.

A review of what was already available on the market found the existing tools to be expensive and inflexible. Building something fit-for-purpose would serve us better and give us complete control over data storage, consent, and how staff input gets used. The tool is mobile-first and voice-enabled, so someone can grab five minutes in a break room and just talk to their phone, with no scheduling or need to find a quiet room. And crucially, it adapts like a human researcher would: if someone gives a short answer, it digs deeper; if they go off on an interesting tangent, it follows that thread.

We ran around 80 successful AI-assisted interviews, which fed directly into our product decisions and gave us a database of staff sentiment we can continue to draw on. That sat alongside more traditional methods, including intercepting people in the canteen fish and chips queue on a Friday, because this was always about adding a tool to our research toolkit, not replacing the human element entirely.

In our first week, we had almost 500,000 views across the intranet. We were immediately seeing around 15,000 users daily, essentially our entire online staff base at any one time.

One of my favourite early moments was opening our analytics and seeing a glowing dot at Harefield Hospital. Staff there had historically been locked out of the main intranet entirely, and suddenly they were on it.

Our tools page is now the third most visited page on the intranet, which might sound unremarkable until you consider what it solved: no one had ever had a single, easy-to-find A to Z of every system and tool available to them across the trust, covering clinical decision support, guidance systems, email, and everything else they needed.

But it wasn’t all plain sailing. Within the first hour of going live, we could see through a search backend that pharmacy-related searches were spiking. We knew pharmacy content hadn't yet moved to the new intranet, so within that first hour we added a promoted search result directing staff straight to where that content still lived. By the end of the first 24 hours, we'd added over 80 promoted search results, acting as a safety net for staff landing on a new platform where not everything had moved yet. That responsiveness, built into the system, has become central to how we manage the transition.

Our health, wellbeing, discounts and support hub now consistently appear in our top 10 pages every single week, with thousands more staff accessing that content than ever before, meaning thousands more people are finding out about the comprehensive offer the trust has for them.

Sitting at around number 23 in our most visited pages, competing with clinical guidance, incident reporting, and HR, is our restaurants, vending machines, and food page. We'd heard enough from staff during research to suspect this would matter more than people might assume, but seeing it consistently outperform pages we'd have guessed were more "essential" was still striking. For staff working 12.5-hour shifts in intensive conditions, knowing where to get food during their day isn't a trivial problem, and it's reassuring to know we can now actually help with it.

Mobile uptake is still growing, largely because staff are so used to not being able to access the intranet on their phone that many simply don't know it's possible yet, and that's something we're working hard to change. But the story I keep coming back to is one we heard from sessions with some of our roaming operational staff, including our porters, housekeepers, and security teams. In one of those sessions, someone was shown the new intranet for the first time and said it was the most included they had ever felt by the Trust.

We've also built a Doctor's Hub, developed with our chief resident doctor and the medical office team, bringing together everything a rotating resident doctor needs in one place: induction materials, HR and pay information, and support resources. Resident doctors can land in a new trust and need to get up to speed quickly, and improving their working lives is a major NHS priority right now.

We're currently in a development and improvement sprint. The thing I'm most excited about is search, which is already a hundred times better than it was and means you can actually find things now, but we know there's still friction in the clicking and scrolling.

We're exploring a contextual search panel that would surface key information directly in the results: a mini page within search, particularly useful for clinical contexts and organisational priorities.

Before the end of the year, we're aiming to close out our final remaining legacy intranet, with around 20,000 items still to work through. And beyond that, the vision stays the same: one place where you don't need to know where anything lives, where you can just find it, a genuine one-stop shop for information for 23,700 people, wherever they are and whatever device they're on.