The challenge

Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust is the principal provider of community health and care services across Sussex, supporting a population of 1.3 million through a workforce of more than 5,800 staff. Care is delivered to adults, children and families across homes, community hospitals and GP practices, with services structured through teams that report into services, then into three clinical divisions, and ultimately to the executive level.

When the Trust set out to replace its ageing Datix system, it quickly became clear that the opportunity extended far beyond a straightforward platform migration. Critical governance processes — particularly those relating to CQC preparedness, clinical audits and policy management — had become fragmented across a patchwork of spreadsheets, Word documents and locally stored files. This made it extremely difficult to build a consistent, organisation-wide picture of performance and risk.

The Trust’s approach to regulatory inspections had become inherently reactive. Each CQC visit triggered a last-minute scramble to locate and compile evidence, draining time and creating unnecessary pressure.

Sussex Community wanted to move decisively towards a model of continuous readiness — one where information was centralised, evidence stayed current, teams understood the CQC framework, and ownership of quality and compliance data sat clearly at the frontline.

The solution

Sussex Community selected Ideagen Healthcare Guardian for its ability to act as a single, unified source of truth shaped around the Trust’s specific organisational structure. The platform’s out-of-the-box CQC app provided a strong starting point, while its deep customisation capabilities allowed the team to build entirely new processes from the ground up — including an accurate mirror of the Trust’s team-to-service-to-division hierarchy, enabling roll-up reporting and granular, role-based permissions.

A pivotal design decision was the shift from static document uploads to live data links. Rather than attaching files that would quickly fall out of date, the team configured the system to link directly to live reports within Ideagen Healthcare Guardian and to policies hosted on the staff intranet. As Oana Poraicu-Vaz, Project and Support Advisor, explained: “Live links mean evidence stays up to date… if it’s a policy, we link directly to the live policy on our staff intranet instead of uploading a document that might become out of date.”

The Trust worked closely with a senior Ideagen Healthcare Guardian consultant throughout the build, combining external expertise with the internal team’s vision for how governance should work in practice.

Migration followed a phased approach beginning in July 2023. Four core apps went live in December 2023, with additional apps following in January 2024 and a rolling third phase bringing formerly spreadsheet-based processes online. The centrepiece of the programme — a purpose-built CQC app — was rolled out service by service from July 2025, designed around three pillars: evidence libraries, self-assessment and fundamental standards tracking.

Evidence libraries were established at both trust and service level using a simple questionnaire format, with automated date-stamping and a workflow that routes submissions into a central, searchable repository. The self-assessment component used objects and measures to empower over 200 team leads to rate their own performance against each CQC sub-statement, with the system automatically calculating and rolling up average ratings through the organisational hierarchy. Sunburst visualisations gave managers an immediate, colour-coded overview of performance — with the ability to drill down from a trust-wide view right through to the specific issue affecting a single team’s rating.

The results

Rapid adoption at scale

The self-assessment component went live at the beginning of August 2025 and adoption was swift. Elise Stratton, Quality and Safety Facilitator, reported: “We only went live with the self-assessment component from the beginning of August 2025… over 200 teams… and we’re currently showing a bit over three quarters of the self-assessment completed.” That level of engagement within roughly two months demonstrated strong frontline buy-in.

Meaningful quality conversations

The self-assessment process has sparked important dialogue both within and across teams, helping to surface and reduce variations in practice. The visual drill-down capability of the sunburst charts gives managers a clear route to improvement, pinpointing exactly which teams need support and in which areas. Board-level engagement has been strong, with senior leaders actively championing the programme’s role in driving CQC readiness.From reactive scramble to continuous readiness

By establishing a central, live evidence library, Sussex Community has moved away from the pre-inspection rush that previously defined its CQC preparation. Evidence is now maintained in real time, giving the Trust greater confidence in its compliance position and freeing staff from the burden of last-minute documentation gathering.

What comes next

Sussex Community is working towards completing the full service-by-service CQC app rollout by its October 2025 target and plans to formalise an annual review cycle for both evidence and self-assessments. The team also intends to extend access to additional apps using new platform capabilities, and is committed to sharing its experience with the wider Ideagen Healthcare Guardian user community to support other trusts on their own quality improvement journeys.