Case Study: Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust Achieved 32% DNA Reduction With Netcall

The Challenge

Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust is one of two dedicated specialist trusts in the UK solely focusing on the health of women, babies and their families.

It serves a highly diverse population, with complex needs shaped by language, culture, accessibility and digital confidence.

The Trust realized that language barriers, low health literacy, sensory impairment, neurodiverse needs and digital exclusion meant that communication itself had become an invisible barrier to care, driving health inequality.

This caused:

• High levels of Did Not Attends (DNAs) driven by communication barriers
• Late or missed letters due to postal delays and rigid processes
• Patients unable to navigate appointments or understand care pathways
• Staff time consumed by manual processes, follow-ups and rebooking
• A lack of patient dignity and autonomy where some patients were unable to manage their own care.

The Solution

Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust led a ground-up transformation, combining digital innovation with patient co-design to rethink communication.

Netcall’s Liberty Converse was already powering the contact centre, so they worked with the team at Netcall to introduce Patient Hub, our patient engagement portal.

Working in close collaboration with Netcall, they created one of the NHS’s first fully operational, end-to-end multilingual and accessible communication pathways. These were not separate services; they were embedded into routine operational workflows, delivering inclusion at scale.

Key elements included:

• Patient engagement via Patient Hub – Digital letters, reminders, appointment management and waiting list validation at scale
• Inclusive, localized communication – Top 10 patient languages identified and deployed (including Arabic, Kurdish, Urdu, Tamil), including languages that read right-to-left, as well as alternative formats like Braille, British Sign Language and large print
• Translated letters and SMS
• Patient-first communication – clear information and compassionate, context-aware messaging
• Personalization and choice on communication preferences
• Data-driven continuous improvement – real-time reporting to identify gaps and underserved groups.

The Result

• 50,000+ digital appointment communications delivered at just 30% roll-out
• 70% read rates – digital read and response rates with sustained engagement – up to 80% when including re-reads
• 32% DNA reduction in some pathways, 18% reduction on average across all pathways
• 2 week validation – waiting list validation completed in under two weeks – manual methods took months or years
• £5,000 monthly savings on postage costs, projected £60,000 annually due to 68% reduction in letter printing and posting
• Multilingual uptake, including increases of 411% growth in Portuguese use, 394% in Romanian and 711% in Arabic
• 10,000+ successful patient interactions where information was accessed, understood and acted upon

“By embedding inclusion into everything we do, we’ve improved engagement, reduced missed appointments and given patients greater control over their healthcare journey.

It’s a fundamental shift in how we deliver care,“ said Paula Brennan, Senior Digital Program Manager and Digital Inclusion Lead, Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust.

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This post has been re-published by kind permission of Netcall - view the original article.

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Reviewed by: Robyn Coppell