Getting discharge information understood before a family goes home
36% of this Trust’s patients are from global majority backgrounds. The maternity service set out to make sure women who do not speak English as a first language understood their infant feeding and gestational diabetes advice before going home.
Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust
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642 women
In the maternity cohort with gestational diabetes
17.3% of the cohort – the group the work focused on
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52%
Of staff reported delays reaching Tamil-speaking patients
Trust staff survey, 2024
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61%
Of staff were relying on generic machine translation
Trust baseline survey before deployment
The situation
Epsom and St Helier serves a diverse population with significant Arabic and Tamil-speaking communities. A clinical audit found delays reaching Tamil-speaking patients and more difficulty out of hours. It also found gestational diabetes in 17.3% of the maternity cohort – a condition that needs repeated, detailed conversations about testing, diet and infant feeding to manage well.
What the audit exposed about workarounds
Before deployment, only 30% of staff were aware of CardMedic and 61% were relying on generic machine translation for clinical conversations. 18% reported complaints or litigation where communication was a factor. Those are the Trust’s own baseline numbers, and they describe the gap the work was trying to close.
What was deployed
Targeted content for gestational diabetes management, infant feeding, safe sleep and antenatal screening, in the languages and formats the service needed, on iPads on the wards and smartphones for community midwives. The Trust used its BadgerNet maternity records to identify which women needed which content, and built the work into its existing maternity cultural transformation programme rather than running it separately.
What the Trust has recorded so far
Neonatal readmissions among non-English-speaking patients moved from 7.79% in 2023/24 to 7.17% in 2024/25. The Trust links five cases in that period – three in Q2, two in Q3 – to better understanding of infant feeding and jaundice. It estimates that pattern would be worth £30,000 to £50,000 a year if it holds. Half of staff surveyed in Q4 2024 rated the platform useful for conveying information to patients and families.
What happens next
The Trust is continuing to evaluate, specifically to establish whether the readmission reduction is statistically significant, and is extending the content to vaccination information and to procedure-specific material for the South West London Elective Orthopaedic Centre.
“CardMedic has transformed our ability to communicate complex topics like gestational diabetes and safe sleep. It’s reduced interpreter delays, empowered patients and improved our efficiency, allowing more time for care.”
How to read this
Read the readmission figures carefully. The move from 7.79% to 7.17% rests on five identified cases across two quarters, and the Trust itself describes the data as limited by small cohort size and is continuing to evaluate. The £30,000 to £50,000 range is the Trust’s own estimate of what that pattern would be worth annually if it holds – it is not a measured saving, and it is not a figure we would ask another organisation to assume. Everything here describes one maternity service.