When “Just Send Another Email” Becomes a Patient Safety Issue
When your staff don’t know about key feedback features, and you’re managing multiple open risk register items related to information sharing, you don’t have a communication problem. You have a patient safety issue.
Discover how Attollo powered the internal communication of North Hampshire Urgent Care→
This is the reality facing healthcare providers across the UK: outdated systems, email overload, and the constant anxiety of “Are we certain everyone’s working from the latest guidance?”
The Real Cost of Broken Communication
Broken internal communication in healthcare follows a painfully familiar pattern: draft the update, email the managers, print copies for reception, have reception circulate them to operational teams, hope everyone reads them, repeat.
The hidden costs? Staggering.
- Time drain: Senior management spends hours weekly on information cascade alone – before you even count the ad hoc urgent updates that arise constantly in healthcare settings
- Paper waste: Thousands of pages printed annually just for operational updates, plus the environmental impact that increasingly matters to NHS trusts and their staff
- Risk exposure: Multiple open clinical and operational risk items, all connected to information sharing failures. When communication breaks down in healthcare, the consequences aren’t just inconvenient – they’re potentially dangerous
But here’s what really keeps healthcare leaders awake at night: you can’t audit an email chain. You can’t prove who read what, when. You certainly can’t guarantee that the clinician starting their shift at 2am has access to this morning’s critical system update.
Why Generic Solutions Don’t Cut It
We’ve seen healthcare providers try various solutions before coming to us. Some attempt off-the-shelf intranet platforms that promise the world but deliver a disconnected system requiring duplicate data entry. Others try to stretch basic SharePoint beyond its out-of-the-box capabilities, ending up with clunky interfaces that nobody wants to use.
The problem? Healthcare has specific needs that generic solutions simply don’t address – something like an Attollo intranet can help.
What Healthcare Actually Needs:
- Individual accountability with full audit trails – When CQC inspectors come calling, you need to prove not just that information was published, but who accessed it and when
- Targeted, role-based access – Not everyone needs to see everything. Your intranet should handle this automatically
- Push notifications with proof of receipt – Email can be ignored. Push notifications with acknowledgement tracking ensure critical updates actually reach the people who need them
- Version control that actually works – One version of the truth, always. When protocols change, you need absolute certainty that nobody’s working from outdated guidance
- Real-time updates regardless of location – Whether staff are based in the treatment centre, working remotely, or switching between sites, they need immediate access to the latest information
- Mobile accessibility – Because healthcare doesn’t stop when someone leaves their desk
The question facing healthcare leaders isn’t really whether to implement a proper intranet. It’s whether to do it now, proactively, on your terms – or later, reactively, when a serious incident or failed inspection forces the issue.
Discover how Attollo’s healthcare intranet addresses these challenges →
Discover how Attollo powered the internal communication of North Hampshire Urgent Care→
Photo by Daniel Sone