The Communications team at Pennine Care wanted to find a more efficient way to keep staff, visitors and patients informed and up to date on Trust news, guidance, and services and move from print to digital signage. A task made even more critical by the advent of COVID-19 and a huge surge in the volume of time-sensitive communications.
The existing methods using printed posters, pull up banners, and screen savers on staff desktops were time-consuming to manage, involved significant print costs, and were failing to reliably reach around 40% of staff members who don’t use PCs as part of their role so moving from print to digital signage makes sense.
Due to their credentials in the healthcare sector, the Trust turned to Pure AV and NowSignage to help find a better way to manage communications and enable them to reach the 3,600 staff providing mental health and learning disability services across the Greater Manchester area.
The system would need to be centrally controlled, with multiple local administrators responsible for creating and updating localised messaging and content.
The solution
The initial rollout included 51 screens across 17 locations using NowSignage software. The Trust’s Communications team approached staff at each site to confirm their requirement for a screen and commitment to update local content before determining the screen allocation.
The 43”, 49”, and 55” Philips displays are positioned in entrance areas, staff rooms, patient lounges, and waiting areas, offering a bright, engaging canvas for both corporate communications and localised content.
The Communications team uses the NowSignage platform to create and distribute centralised corporate content for display across the full network, complemented with local messages managed by local administrators. There are over 100 local administrators, each with tailored access rights which limit control to their screens and area of responsibility.
The granularity and ease of management of the NowSignage CMS was a critical factor in its selection. The ability to have multiple levels of access and permissions that are easy to set up and manage, along with intuitive content management, has been a key contributing factor to the rollout’s success.
Lindsay Hurst, Communications Manager at Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, said:
“When seeking out a CMS to aid our digital signage transformation programme we had some key requirements; the ability to have multiple levels of access & permissions, be extremely easy and intuitive so that new users can get up to speed quickly, and a platform that was value-driven but had all the premium features we required. NowSignage excelled in all of these areas and had a team with experience and knowledge to guide us through the whole process.”
The system empowers local staff to take control of the screen in their area; it keeps things simple for users, encouraging the creation of engaging content while offering reassurance to the central team, who maintain complete oversight of the content and running of the system.
As part of the rollout, each staff member received training on the software and has access to ongoing support from the Communications team, which can also call on NowSignage and Pure AV as required.
Hugh Caffrey, Administrative Assistant at Pennine Care, said:
“The NowSignage platform has been really useful. It’s a very good way of presenting information to people that otherwise would be looking at multiple posters on a wall, or notices on a notice board.”
The results
The remote access from print to digital signage provided by the NowSignage CMS enables the Communications team to oversee usage, proactively respond to any issues and support local administrators without the need to visit the screen’s location.
The software is proving popular and easy to use. Administrators are finding it quick to update and are managing content with minimal support from the central team.
Savings on print are also mounting quickly, with the estimated reduction in print costs in the first six months’ usage in the thousand pounds.
Lindsay Hurst, Communications Manager Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, said
“We’ve found working with Pure AV and the NowSignage platform really beneficial. It delivers everything we wanted in terms of ease of use, we’ve already made significant savings in printing costs, and we’ve had great feedback from local users. From a communications perspective, it makes our job much more manageable and our messaging looks so much more professional.”
Following completion of this project, NowSignage has since been shortlisted for an AV Award for their ongoing work throughout the NHS, having successfully delivered a total of 12 NHS Trust digital signage projects in just 12 months.