Patient Safety Learning

The newly created charity was looking for a digital partner to support the development of a shared learning repository and community site that would help to save lives by surfacing and championing best practice approaches in the healthcare industry. The repository would house knowledge in all aspects of healthcare that might help to reduce accidents, and encourage practitioners to contribute their own experiences.

They appointed Brew Digital to build a shared learning repository and community site that would help to save lives by surfacing and championing best practice approaches in the healthcare industry. The site had additional requirements, including news, blogs, and event invitations.

One of the key challenges identified was creating a structure that was simple and accessible; other organisations with similar aims had failed due to the complexity of their navigation, and the misalignment of focus and outcomes.

It was established that the focus needed to always be on ‘effecting change’. This required a very defined and single-minded strategy which looked not just at groups with high footfall on the site (e.g. patient safety professionals – admin people) but also on the priority groups for effecting change (e.g. clinicians, who have a lot less free time in front of a browser) and how to ensure the usability for them.

We also needed to gain consensus from the different stakeholders, many of whom entered the process with a preconceived idea of how – and whether – this project could come together. Using our pioneering Decision Sprint process we were able to manage all of these views, and distil them down into one cohesive simple vision and site structure in the space of a few hours.

We know that to build something truly groundbreaking, you need to have the development team involved from the start. Their input on the architecture of the website ensured that what we were proposing was feasible, and that the information delivery would be both fast and robust.

For the hub, the development team chose to use Invision Community as the platform to use for the website. It is a forum community and content software solution, and allows for topics, communities, news, pages, CMS control, search, membership, and many of the other features required as standard. We were then able to develop this off-the-shelf platform further by adding bespoke elements to it, utilising the platform's API and extension mechanism.

the hub launched in October 2019, and quickly became an invaluable service for ensuring patient safety and good practice. It’s used by members in 221 countries, and 92% of NHS Trusts are enrolled. The platform has even won the Leading Healthcare award for its ability to engage members, and its breadth and depth of content.

We continue to work with Patient Safety Learning, evolving the site and continuing to support their mission to enact changes that increase knowledge and reduce accidents in the healthcare sector.

the hub was a victim of its own success. The sheer volume of content, while a testament to its value, had created several usability challenges. Brew Digital was tasked with refreshing the platform to address these issues while navigating significant technical constraints.

Through a collaborative Decision Sprint, we worked with the Patient Safety Learning team to identify what was working well and what needed improvement. This process surfaced several key challenges:

• Design and Usability: The user interface lacked a clear visual hierarchy, making it difficult to distinguish between different content types like research papers and interviews. Key landing pages were cluttered, and a duplication of menus consumed valuable screen space, overwhelming users.

• Search Functionality: The existing search was limited. Users couldn't easily search within whole categories, and the functionality within private community networks was not effective, making content discovery a significant pain point.
  

• Content Categorisation: With a vast number of categories and subcategories, users often had to click multiple times to find the information they needed. Related content suggestions were often irrelevant, failing to guide users effectively.

A further complication was the platform itself. the hub is built on a heavily customised Invision Community platform. Any new design had to work within the existing development limitations and consider a major platform upgrade scheduled for the future. The goal was to design a solution that would solve today’s problems while acting as a bridge to the next version, avoiding a jarring change for users.

Our approach was rooted in data and a deep understanding of user behaviour. We began by analysing heatmaps to see precisely where users were clicking, informing our decisions on how to restructure the homepage to better meet their needs.

Following a lightning gallery exercise, where we identified elements of competitor sites the psl team admired, we created an initial ‘block plan’ structure. This foundational plan, backed by our research, was agreed upon with the client and guided the design process.

To address the core design and usability issues, we delivered a modern, intuitive interface. By leveraging Patient Safety Learning’s brand colour palette, we created clear visual distinctions between different types of content. The homepage was stripped back and decluttered, introducing dynamic ‘content cards’ to make information more engaging and digestible. To complement this, we designed a new bank of colour-coded illustrations, evolving the existing style to be more organic and approachable. This new asset library brings a fresh, modern feel across the entire website—not just the homepage—without requiring page-by-page development.

A key priority was making content easier to find. We moved the search functionality front and centre, placing it in the main navigation header to make it instantly accessible across the entire site. We also added a prominent search bar to the homepage hero banner and gave users the ability to search across all content or filter by specific types, dramatically improving discoverability.

Finally, we addressed content categorisation by shifting the homepage from a long vertical list to a horizontal, card-based layout. This new structure prioritises key Learn and News articles before guiding users to other sections. For users belonging to private networks, we introduced bespoke feeds with the ability for admins to pin important content, creating a more relevant and focused experience.

The redesigned hub launched smoothly with only a one-hour planned downtime. The project successfully modernised the platform's look and feel while delivering powerful new functionality that prepares the hub for its future evolution from Invision Community 4 to 5.

Key results include:

• A modern and engaging user experience: A new look and feel was achieved through strategic design, colour-coding, and the introduction of a new illustration bank.

• Improved discoverability: A simplified navigation and significantly enhanced search functionality allow users to find the content they need quickly and efficiently.

• Enhanced accessibility: The refreshed design meets WCAG accessibility standards, ensuring the platform is usable for everyone.

• Greater Admin control: The Patient Safety Learning team can now add custom notification banners to the site without needing developer support, enabling them to make timely announcements.

• New private network functionality: Members of private networks now benefit from a bespoke content feed, improving engagement within these specialist groups.

• Consistent Brand Experience: The visual refresh extended beyond the hub with a new, modernised HubSpot email template, ensuring a cohesive brand experience for users.

The client was delighted with the new designs, which have successfully balanced user needs with technical requirements, creating a platform that is both easier to use and manage.

Following the success of the homepage refresh, Patient Safety Learning needed to execute a critical, back-end transformation. With Invision Community 4 approaching end of life, the challenge was to upgrade the platform's core infrastructure to Invision Community 5—safely migrating over 20,000 pages of legacy content with minimal disruption to their active, global user base.

Patient Safety Learning faced a critical infrastructure deadline: the underlying framework of their digital platform, Invision Community 4 (IC4), was reaching its end of life—along with large portions of the bespoke code we built for them in 2019.

Upgrading from IC4 was non-negotiable for security and performance, but the move presented severe operational and commercial risks. As an active, member-driven community, taking the site offline for an extended period would effectively kill user engagement, which in turn ultimately puts patients at risk. The upgrade had to be executed as a live migration with zero data loss.

Operating as a non-profit with limited internal technical expertise and strict budget constraints, PSL needed to retain their core functionality while drastically reducing the daily administrative burden on their team. While rival agencies submitted lower initial quotes during the tender process, these proposals were vague and carried significant commercial risk of spiralling costs once discovery began. Brew Digital secured the project through our transparency and candour, outlining a fixed-scope strategy based on our deep historical knowledge of the platform and a realistic understanding of PSL’s operational limits.

Rather than jumping straight into a new build, we began with a comprehensive discovery process to evaluate PSL's evolving needs. We analysed their platform usage, mapped out user journeys, and conducted a thorough comparative analysis of alternative community software—including vBulletin, XenForo, and SaaS alternatives—to determine whether a different system would serve them better long-term. Only after establishing that Invision Community 5 (IC5) offered the safest, most cost-effective, and feature-rich path did we confirm the migration route.

We then led PSL through an immersive change management process, starting with a full-day, in-person workshop. This allowed us to present our gap analysis, surface technical risks early, and align the execution with their commercial reality.

We facilitated honest, pragmatic conversations about budget and expectations. To maximise their investment, we recommended de-scoping certain highly bespoke requests in favour of IC5's out-of-the-box functionality. This included transitioning their private member networks into IC5's native Clubs feature, significantly reducing administrative overhead for the PSL team and setting them up for scalable growth.

The upgrade provided the ideal opportunity to clear out years of technical debt and legacy features. We entirely reset their publishing workflow, introducing draft functionality and moving staff away from complex user submission queues to standardise native publishing—creating a clearer, far more efficient process.

To manage the live rollout without overwhelming the client, we ran the build in agile two-week cycles. This provided PSL with prototypes and access to a work-in-progress development environment to review, reducing cognitive overload and giving them complete visibility of the work as it happened. Crucially, we utilised an AI tool to automatically generate robust QA testing scripts directly from our Jira tickets and UAT/QA feedback documentation, ensuring every critical user pathway was validated by our project manager prior to launch.

The migration to IC5 fortified PSL's digital infrastructure for the next decade. Despite the complexity of safely transferring over 20,000 legacy pages and executing a live database upgrade, the platform suffered no data loss, no SEO degradation, and minimal downtime. Through diligent project management and a transparent working relationship, we were able to bring the project in on budget and on time—launching on the agreed date set at the start of the project.

Sensible project scoping and taking the time to truly understand the needs of the PSL team allowed us to present a strategic shift to native platform features that not only modernised the user experience but fundamentally streamlined how the internal team manages daily content. This included a dramatic refinement of their content types and fields on the website to make for a simpler experience.

Key stats:

• 35% under their budget: Delivered in 65 days against a maximum 90 day allocation through strict scope discipline and efficient sprint delivery.

• Zero data loss: 100% retention of all legacy content, user permissions, and structural data without impacting existing SEO paths.

• 4 month delivery end-to-end from kick-off to delivery.

• Trusted technical partner since 2018.