
Success Stories
Guy's and
St Thomas' NHS
Foundation Trust
The story
Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust provides a wide variety of world-class specialist research, development, teaching, community and critical care services across South London and is designated as a Category 1 responder.
"Working with the K2 partner Velocity IT, Guy’s and St Thomas’ linked the
power of K2’s SmartForms with the power of Everbridge’s ER notifications system to create the U.K.’s first ever end-to-end acute healthcare business continuity management system."
The Challenge
Guy’s and St Thomas’ relied on a range of spreadsheets and Windows-based files to meet the stringent requirements of the Civil Contingencies Act but found that this method was unwieldy and not transparent enough.
Justin Cucklow, Senior Emergency Planning Officer at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust explains "During an incident response, we didn’t have good visibility into which parts of the business are affected and how we’re prioritizing our resources to maintain patient care."
"When things go seriously wrong, the international standard for contingency planning and disaster recovery states that the best way to implement a response is with lots of resources, made available to the public within minutes, not days. It is incumbent upon Guy’s and St Thomas’ to plan responses across 150 departments and enact them when necessary, as well as stay operationally efficient and minimize downtime."
The Solution
Guy’s and St Thomas’ wanted a database solution that would bring together three core elements: the ability to leverage the enterprise-wide license they already had with K2, support from an in-house development team and integration with Everbridge.
With K2 and Everbridge, Guy’s and St Thomas’ felt that “there was a real opportunity to link together two systems, both of which are highly resilient, to transform the way that we deliver business continuity management.” Working with their K2 partner Velocity IT, Guy’s and St Thomas’ linked the power of K2’s SmartForms with the power of Everbridge’s ER notifications system to create U.K.’s first end-to-end acute healthcare business continuity management system.
The K2 database provides an intuitive, easy to navigate environment tailored for both clinical and non-clinical services. Guy’s and St Thomas’ can now rapidly add in new risks, such as Ebola or an active shooting, and be immediately assured that all departments have action plans.
SmartForms surfaces all the data in SharePoint, meaning users no longer have to run around and gather data from various portals or log in to different systems. The solution built by Velocity IT on K2 also provides impact analysis and reporting on key metrics and areas so management can focus on further resilience planning, training and investment opportunities.

“There was a real opportunity to link together two systems, both of which are highly resilient, to transform the way that we deliver business continuity management.”
The Benefits
Drills and training exercises have proved what Guy’s and St Thomas’ had hoped, their K2/Everbridge system would facilitate: whether it’s two ‘o’clock in the morning and a Band 6 nurse is responding to a catastrophic or major impact event, or it’s nine ‘o’clock in the morning and an executive director is responding to the same alert, there is a consistent response.
Plus, clinicians can spend more time delivering care instead of developing emergency response strategies from scratch.
The Outcome
Building this solution with K2 and Everbridge saved Guy’s and St Thomas’ incalculable resources and frustration.
“If we had to use normal code tools, we would have stumbled at the first hurdle,” Justin Cucklow explains.
“If we were to have fiddled around with Windows Workflow, this would have been very difficult.”
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