Desktop Screensavers Powering Healthcare Communication at the NHS

1. Customer overview

Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL) is one of the largest community and mental health trusts in the United Kingdom. With more than 9,000 staff working across over 150 healthcare sites, the Trust operates in a highly complex environment that spans clinics, community healthcare centres, inpatient facilities, and specialist care services. Its workforce is widely dispersed, highly mobile, and includes a mix of clinical and non-clinical roles, many of which do not work from a traditional desk-based setting.

2. The challenge

CNWL faced long-standing challenges with reaching all staff in a timely and consistent way. Critical updates, organisational priorities, and safety messages were not always being seen by the workforce, especially those working across high-demand clinical services. Traditional channels such as email, intranet posts, and team briefs lacked the necessary visibility, leading to uneven awareness across departments and locations.

The Trust needed a channel that would reliably bring important information to the surface, regardless of where staff were working or how often they engaged with existing communication platforms. Any solution had to work at scale, avoid adding operational burden, and integrate cleanly into their existing IT environment without creating additional complexity.

3. Why this mattered

In a healthcare setting, effective communication is critical. When staff do not see or retain important information, it can impact engagement, wellbeing, and the delivery of organisational initiatives.

For CNWL, inconsistent reach risked:

• Delays in staff seeing important clinical, operational, and organisational updates
• Reduced visibility of wellbeing, HR, and culture-related information
• Difficulty ensuring consistent messaging across a highly distributed workforce
• A reliance on email as the dominant channel, which contributed to information overload

Improving message reach was not simply a communications objective. It was essential to supporting a connected, informed workforce across a demanding and fast-paced environment.

4. The solution

CNWL selected Vibe.fyi’s desktop screensaver communication channel as a way to bring key messages directly to staff desktops. The solution was deployed to 9,000 healthcare workers devices during October and November 2025.

The project was delivered in partnership with Wavenet, Vibe’s referral partner, who secured the engagement as part of a wider scope of IT services delivered to NHS Trusts. Wavenet managed the deployment end to end, working closely with CNWL’s IT team.

The rollout followed a structured project plan, including testing, staged deployment, and governance aligned with NHS security and compliance requirements. This approach ensured the screensaver channel was implemented smoothly, with minimal disruption to staff and no impact on clinical systems.

Once deployed, the screensaver became an always-visible communication channel, surfacing key messages at natural moments in the working day, such as returning to desks, or stepping away between tasks.

Reimagining the screensaver as a modern communication channel

CNWL’s project demonstrates how Vibe has transformed the traditional screensaver into a modern visual communication channel. Instead of static or rarely updated content, Vibe enables regularly changing, visually engaging messages designed to capture attention and remain effective over time.

Vibe is designed to give communications teams practical control over how visual messages are created and maintained. Its template library reduces the effort required to produce consistent, well-structured visual content, making it easier to update and refresh messaging without ongoing reliance on design resources.

How content is delivered is equally important. For CNWL, a key requirement was ensuring messages remained visible and engaging without becoming overexposed. This is addressed through spaced repetition, where messages are rotated and reintroduced at planned intervals rather than shown on constant repeat. Changing content over time helps keep screens visually fresh and engaging, while spacing messages improves the likelihood that key information is noticed and remembered, reducing the risk of message fatigue.

Together, this approach ensures important messages remain visible and engaging over time, without overwhelming staff or adding visual noise. It has proven particularly effective in complex healthcare environments, where communication needs to be clear, consistent, and easy to absorb alongside day-to-day clinical work.

5. Key outcomes and benefits

The introduction of Vibe’s screensaver channel provided CNWL with a reliable, high-visibility communication platform that reached staff every day without adding workload or requiring behavioural change.

Observable outcomes included:

• High visibility of messages across all desktop users, ensuring important updates were consistently seen
• Positive staff feedback, including from frontline teams who appreciated having key information surfaced in a clear, accessible way
• Strong endorsement from senior leaders, who viewed the screensaver channel as a practical solution to longstanding communication challenges
• Improved engagement, demonstrated by staff responding to content, providing suggestions, and requesting longer display times for items such as QR codes
• A more predictable communication rhythm, reducing dependence on email and freeing the Internal Communications team to prioritise message quality and planning

Feedback from Jane Rogers, Head of Internal Communications, reflects the impact:

“In every meeting I go to, people are very excited about the screensavers. They are definitely having an impact. We get lots of positive comments from frontline staff as well, including suggestions like extending the duration of QR codes so they have time to scan them. From everything I have heard, the feedback has been really positive.”

6. What made this successful

Several factors contributed to the effectiveness of the project:

• Clear alignment between IT and Internal Communications, supported by a structured deployment plan led by Wavenet
• Executive-level support, which helped encourage adoption and reinforced the importance of consistent communication
• A targeted approach to visual communication, ensuring messages were concise, relevant, and immediately understood
• A solution that required no behavioural change from staff, fitting naturally into existing work patterns
• A fast, low-friction rollout, made possible by strong governance and collaboration across teams
• Vibe’s ease of use, enabling communication staff to publish content quickly without IT involvement

Learnings from similar large-scale visual communication projects also applied here. Screensaver and Lock Screen communication is particularly effective in clinical settings because it reaches staff at natural moments in their workflow such as logging in, returning to their desks, or pausing between tasks. It avoids the pitfalls of email overload and cuts through competing messages by placing essential information in a place staff cannot miss.

7. Looking ahead

The success of the desktop rollout has opened the door to a broader visual communication strategy at CNWL. The next opportunity being explored is extending reach beyond desk-based staff to frontline teams who are not desk-bound, by using digital signage screens already positioned in common areas.

This will allow CNWL to:

• Deliver consistent messaging to both desk-based and frontline staff
• Use shared spaces to reinforce culture, wellbeing initiatives, and safety updates
• Provide relevant visual information to patients and visitors in waiting areas and reception zones
• Build a unified communication experience across multiple channels