Acute and community Trust-wide, 6,300 staff, from November 2025

Stockport NHS Foundation Trust: every patient understood, from the bedside to the community

One launch across every hospital and community service, CardMedic at 455 bedsides, and a year of the Trust’s own activity and cost data to show what changed.

70% more

Patient interactions in year one

Recorded activity across hospital and community services
Under £4

Per interaction through CardMedic

Interpreter calls placed in the app included, against £26 through traditional routes
£26 to around £16

Average across the whole language service

The Trust’s own language-service costs, modelled with its CardMedic activity

The challenge

A diverse community, where reliance on face-to-face interpreting had led to rapidly rising costs, and communication barriers were affecting patient experience and safety.

What the Trust did

Introduced CardMedic across all hospital and community services in one launch, for its 6,300 staff: clinically assured content, Easy Read, Read Aloud, British Sign Language, Live Translate (a machine-translation feature with stated limits), and one-tap access to the Trust’s existing interpreting provider. Kurdish Sorani was added to reflect the local community.

A shared approach, at the bedside

Working with SparkTSL, CardMedic runs on 455 SPARK Fusion® bedside devices across 20 wards at Stepping Hill Hospital.

Interpreters remain central for the conversations that need them – consent, safeguarding, mental capacity, breaking bad news, complaints, and complex or open-ended discussions. CardMedic supports the many everyday ones.

The impact

One year of recorded activity, plus the Trust’s own cost modelling.

70% more patient interactions in year one.
Under £4 per interaction through CardMedic, with interpreter calls included, against £26 through traditional routes.
The average across the Trust’s whole language service fell from £26 to around £16 – and moves lower as use grows, because the licence is fixed.
19,361 patient card interactions and 5,725 Live Translate conversations, with 1,229 registered staff across nursing, midwifery, medical, health visiting and allied health roles.
1,013 Read Aloud uses, 231 BSL video views and 225 Easy Read views.
Staff reported waits of 15 to 30 minutes to arrange a traditional interpreter call. Communication can start straight away while that call is arranged.

Year one: access. Next: savings.

Year one at Stockport was about reach: 70% more patient interactions, for a 9.6% increase in overall language-service spend, with the cost of each conversation falling sharply. Savings can grow as more conversations move to the most appropriate route – clinically assured content and Live Translate for everyday conversations, video and telephone interpreting through CardMedic where an interpreter is needed, and face-to-face interpreting kept for the conversations that need it most.

That pattern is already showing elsewhere. In an independent SBRI Healthcare-funded evaluation in urgent and emergency care, the blended cost per interaction fell by more than 50%, while the professional interpreter route stayed open and in use – 255 interpreter calls placed through the app within 7,503 supported interactions, on top of booked interpreting. The evaluators describe the cost figures as indicative.

The principle is simple: the licence is fixed, so every additional conversation through CardMedic lowers the average cost, while patients keep appropriate access to professional interpreters.

In the Trust’s words

“CardMedic enables equality across our services.”

Pam Fearns
Chief Nursing Information Officer, Stockport NHS Foundation Trust

Why it matters

Combining CardMedic, the Trust’s interpreting provider and SparkTSL’s bedside devices means more patients supported, interpreters used where they matter most, and a predictable, fixed licence cost.

How to read this

These are the Trust’s own figures, not an independent evaluation. Usage figures are recorded platform activity for this Trust only, not our total activity. The cost figures are modelled on the Trust’s own activity and language-service costs, and the cost per interaction is our calculation on that data. They are findings from one organisation, not a promise for yours – we will model yours from your own data and share the method.