NHS: the platform that helped three counties work as one
The brief
In 2018, the NHS organisations commissioning care for Bristol, North Somerset, and South Gloucestershire merged into a single body: BNSSG CCG, responsible for the health of around a million people. A merger on paper is one thing. Making three counties' worth of clinical groups actually work as one, sharing plans, sharing information, working to the same calendar, is another. We were contracted to build the central place where that could happen.
What we did
The platform
We built the collaboration platform the merging clinical groups worked from: a shared calendar and a shared data area, so teams that had spent years as three separate organisations could see the same picture and plan against it. Unglamorous, essential machinery, and the foundation everything that followed was built on. The work sat where our systems thinking lives: making the digital tools an organisation runs on talk to each other and to the people using them.
What it became
That platform grew into something much bigger under the partnership's Healthier Together brand: the hub for the whole three-county health area. And when Covid arrived, it became the front door. Healthier Together carried the area's public coronavirus information: shielding support, the helplines for all three local authorities, testing and self-isolation guidance, vaccination clinics. When people across Bristol, North Somerset, and South Gloucestershire needed to know what to do, this is where the NHS sent them. Building for that means building for everyone: every device, every connection, every level of confidence with the web, in plain language, at a moment when getting it wrong had consequences.
Working at NHS scale
The technical work was half the job. The other half was the organisation itself: clinical leads, communications teams, commissioners, and partner bodies across three counties, each with their own stakeholders and sign-off, all needing one platform to serve them. We learned to work the way public-sector delivery demands: documented decisions, clear stages, work presented so the people accountable for it could approve it with confidence. Years inside that structure are where our public-sector working practice was built.
The staff-support framework
After the pandemic's peak, NHS England contracted us to build a support framework inside the platform for the people who had carried the system through it: NHS staff. The brief was to bring every support mechanism available to every type of employee into one place, from doctors' unions to cleaning staff and everyone between, so that any member of staff could find what was available to them and be signposted straight to it. We built the framework and the signposting structure that made that possible.
The close
The engagement concluded in 2022, the year the NHS reorganised nationally and clinical commissioning groups gave way to integrated care boards. The platform we built had carried the area's health partnership from the formation of the merged organisation to the reorganisation that succeeded it: through the merger it was created to serve, through the pandemic nobody saw coming, and into the structure that followed. Alongside the platform work, we also delivered in-person accessibility training to the digital team at University Hospital Bristol, the same accessibility-first practice we build to, taught hands-on.
What this engagement says
Most of our work is measured in rankings and revenue. This one is measured differently: a platform trusted with a three-county health system's collaboration, a million people's pandemic information, and the welfare signposting of an NHS workforce, running reliably from the merged organisation's formation to the reorganisation that succeeded it.
If your organisation carries public responsibility and needs digital that carries it too, this is the work we do.
Tell us what you're working on
Thirty minutes, free, no slides, with a one-page note in your inbox afterwards, whether or not we work together.
