Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust
Its services are organized into a clear structure of teams, which report up to services, then to one of three clinical divisions, and finally to the executive level. The Quality and Safety department, which championed the Ideagen Healthcare Guardian implementation, provides support across this entire structure.
Oana Poraicu-Vaz, Project and Support Advisor and Elise Stratton, Quality and Safety Facilitator.
What the customer says:
“Over 200 teams onboarded: three quarters completed self-assessment within two months.”
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Case Study
Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust needed to replace its legacy system and consolidate critical governance processes scattered across spreadsheets and local files. Their goal was to standardize reporting, improve transparency, and create a centralized, up-to-date evidence base to end the "scramble" before CQC inspections.
The Trust undertook a phased migration to Ideagen Healthcare Guardian, culminating in a highly configured CQC app. The app established a unified evidence library, enabled team-level self-assessments against CQC quality statements, and digitized compliance tracking.
Sussex Community’s journey began with the need to replace its legacy Datix system. However, the opportunity was much bigger than a simple system swap. Many critical processes, particularly those related to CQC preparedness, clinical audits, and policy management, were fragmented across numerous Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and local files. This made it difficult to gain a consistent, trust-wide view of performance and risk.
A key objective was to move away from a reactive approach to regulatory inspections. The Trust wanted to eliminate the last-minute scramble to gather documentation and instead foster a state of continuous readiness. This required a solution that could not only centralize information but also build staff familiarity with the CQC framework, promote transparency, and give teams clear ownership of their quality and compliance data.
Sussex Community chose Ideagen Healthcare Guardian for its capacity to create a single, unified source of truth tailored to their specific organizational needs. The out-of-the-box nature of the CQC app gave Sussex Community a strong foundation to build on and the platform's deep customization capabilities were essential for building new processes from the ground up. It allowed Sussex Community to build an accurate mirror of its Team-to-Service-to-Division hierarchy directly within the system, enabling accurate, roll-up reporting and sophisticated, role-based permissions.
The ability to link directly to live data sources was a game-changer. Instead of uploading static documents that quickly become outdated, the team could link to live reports within Ideagen and to policies on the staff intranet, ensuring evidence is always current. To deliver the CQC app, the Trust also worked closely with a senior Ideagen Healthcare Guardian consultant, blending expert support with their own vision.
The Trust adopted a phased migration starting in July 2023. Phase one saw the go-live of four core apps in December 2023. Phase two followed in January 2024 with additional apps, before a rolling third phase brought formerly spreadsheet-based processes like online.
The centerpiece of their work is the CQC app, rolled out service-by-service from July 2025. It was designed around three core pillars: creating evidence libraries, enabling self-assessment, and tracking fundamental standards.
Using a simple questionnaire format, the team established trust-level and service-level evidence libraries. This allows users to easily attach files or link to live sources, with the system automatically dating the entries. A workflow moves the submission into a central library, creating an organized and searchable repository.
“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 self-assessment process was built using objects and measures, empowering over 200 team leads to rate their performance against each CQC sub-statement. The system then automatically calculates and rolls up average ratings for each Quality Statement and Key Question through the organizational hierarchy. Sunburst visualizations provide an immediate, color-coded overview of performance, allowing managers to drill down from a trust-wide view to the specific issue impacting a single team’s rating. A dedicated hub page and scoped permissions ensure a simple and relevant user experience.
“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.”
The process has prompted vital conversations within and across teams, helping to identify and reduce variations in practice. The visual drill-down capabilities of the sunburst charts give managers a clear pathway for improvement, showing them exactly which teams need support and in what areas. This visibility has also captured the attention of the board, which is highly engaged and supportive of the project's success in driving CQC readiness. By creating a central, live evidence library, the Trust has successfully reduced the pre-inspection scramble and built confidence in its compliance position.
Sussex Community plans to complete the full, service-by-service rollout of the CQC app by its October 2025 target. The team will also continue to refine its processes, formalizing an annual review cadence for both evidence and self-assessments. Looking ahead, they plan to leverage new platform capabilities to expand access to other apps and will continue sharing their journey and learnings with the wider Ideagen Healthcare Guardian user community to help other trusts on their own quality improvement path.
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