SpeakUp
Raising Anonymous Concerns in the NHS
Giving NHS Staff a Safe Voice
The NHS needed a way for staff to raise workplace concerns anonymously. With over 700 Freedom to Speak Up Guardians across 400+ organisations in England, most were relying on email, phone, or incident reporting systems like RLDatix, making it difficult to process anonymous feedback at scale.
Future Workshops built SpeakUp as an end-to-end platform for raising and resolving concerns. Staff use the mobile app to report issues while remaining truly anonymous. Guardians use the accompanying web portal to assign, track, and resolve cases. The result: a 700% increase in concerns raised in the first year.
"The app has been welcomed by staff, especially those who don't traditionally use computers in their day-to-day jobs and wouldn't email the Guardian or ambassadors."
Emilia
Olejniczak
Innovation Facilitator, UHCW NHS Trust
Measurable Impact
Launched in October 2022 during national Speak Up Month, the app has had a significant impact on patient safety, quality of care, and staff engagement.
↑700%
Increase in concerns raised in Q1 2023 vs Q1 2022
11k
NHS staff access the app
800,000+
Episodes of care annually covered at UHCW
Built with App Rail
University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) , with over 11000 employees, is one of the UK's largest NHS Trusts. Lorna Shaw, the Trust's Freedom to Speak Up Guardian, wanted to create an additional channel to encourage all staff to raise concerns. The Trust believed that an app would provide convenience, privacy, and access to appropriate information as well as to the Freedom to Speak Up team.
The UHCW team built the first version of SpeakUp in 3 months using Future Workshops' App Rail platform. The app was then refined through a series of focused workshops and feedback sessions.
Convenient & Accessible
SpeakUp delivers an intuitive, user-friendly and psychologically safe experience for all NHS workers, including those who do not have access to computers in their day-to-day jobs.
An Award-Winning App
The SpeakUp app has been rolled out to all 11,000 employees at UHCW. In 2022 the application won an Award for Excellence in Communication from Health Tech News. In 2023 SpeakUp was shortlisted for the Health Service Journal Awards 2023 in the Staff Wellbeing category.