AWARD WINNERS: Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust wins HSJ Patient Engagement Initiative of the Year award | News

We are beyond pleased to announce that off the back of last night's industry leading HSJ Partnership Awards 2025, the Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (RSCH) has won the prestigious Patient Engagement and Experience Initiative of the Year award. This accolade recognises their groundbreaking Parent Portal, a digital platform designed to provide expectant and new parents with accessible, bias-free, and educationally focused maternity information.

Developed in collaboration with VerseOne Group, the market-leading provider of transformative digital solutions to the NHS, the Parent Portal is a unique, user-centric tool that has already made a significant impact on prospective parents in the Surrey area. As the digital solution partner behind this project, we are so proud to have helped bring this vision to life, enabling better access to clinically-led information and enhancing the patient experience for parents across the region.

Not only has the portal empowered more prospective parents to feel prepared for birth and parenthood, enabled a steep increase in the amount of prospective parents who can access and take part in antenatal classes, and encouraged the sharing of content and knowledge across the region. But, the Parent Portal is also breaking down barriers by making essential maternity education available through:

• Over 200 languages, ensuring inclusivity for diverse communities.
• Instant translations and subtitles, helping those with hearing impairments.
• Support for ethnic minority groups, including Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller communities.
• Increased accessibility for those with visual impairments.
• Partnership with the Good Things Foundation, providing smart devices and SIM cards to combat digital exclusion.

This award is a testament to the fantastic work that RSCH have been doing to transform the patient experience in the Maternity sector. Kate Conway and the Maternity Team have developed a service that has gone from strength to strength, including being rated as Outstanding by the QCQ in 2024 off the back of their work in the sector.

Myself, the rest of the Maternity Team & our Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership service user group, at Royal Surrey are elated to have been recognised for our work developing the Parent Portal. We believe every woman is important and the Portal has supported us to increase women's access to, and equity of trusted sources of evidence based information and parent education. It's pushed us to be innovative at meeting language, socioeconomic and digital needs and had had huge benefits on our service and will continue to develop with us.

This award win is a reflection of the tremendous impact we have had on prospective parents across the region and we're truly proud of this great achievement.

We'd like to extend our deepest congratulations to the Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (RSCH) for this prestigious win, receiving the resounding recognition they deserve for delivering such a groundbreaking and impactful service for their local community. To find out the results that drove them to being nominated, check out our finalists announcement blog.

Or if you'd like to understand the benefits your Trust could gain such as improved service delivery and higher income through more babies delivered, get in touch with the VerseOne NHS Team or complete the form below to register your interest in being kept up to date around our upcoming Maternity Portal webinars, hosted in conjunction with Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.