The challenge
Mandatory training compliance in a large NHS trust is not a small administrative matter. Tens of thousands of staff, each needing to complete and evidence specific training, across dozens of sites — and when the record is a paper register, the trust cannot answer a simple question quickly: who has been trained, on what, and when. Disputes follow. So do audit findings.
Barts Health needed the record to be accurate, immediate and available to the person it described. The requirement was not a clever product. It was a system that would still be right in ten years, in an environment where getting it wrong has consequences that reach patients.
A traditional LMS was insufficient for Barts' needs, particularly around integration, workflow flexibility, and meeting exact clinical education requirements.
How we worked together
We built CATQR, a QR-based attendance system, and replaced the paper register. Staff check in from their own phones; the record exists the moment they do. Compliance reporting stops being a monthly reconstruction and becomes something you look up.
Adoption passed 90% of staff. Inductions run more smoothly, reporting is cleaner, and disputes about attendance largely stopped, because everyone — including the individual — can see their own record.
The same approach went on to serve the complex requirements of Queen Mary University of London's dental school, where students rotate across clinical settings and attendance has to hold up to professional-body scrutiny.
What matters more than any of that: the team did not change. The people who understood why the system was built the way it was were still there when the requirements moved — and in the NHS, requirements move.
Then the requirements moved a great deal
During the pandemic, the same building-level visibility the system had been designed for turned out to answer a different question entirely. At the NHS Nightingale temporary hospital, CATQR's real-time picture of who was where in a building was used for evacuation planning and for infection tracing. This impressed the Care Quality Commission.
No one specified that in the original brief. It was possible because the system had been built by people who expected to still be responsible for it, in a way that could be adapted quickly by people who already knew it.
Outcome
More than a decade on, the engagement continues, and the work has extended to other trusts — Frimley Health, Homerton Healthcare, Lewisham & Greenwich, St George's — with recent additions at Cambridgeshire & Peterborough and Sheffield Children's.
Along the way the security posture behind the work was recognised publicly by the people responsible for it inside the NHS, and our UK entity became an approved supplier on the government's G-Cloud framework — a route that exists precisely because public-sector buyers need evidence before they can proceed.
We're delighted to see the progress Shinetech has made over the past decade in supporting Barts Health NHS Trust — spanning major operational shifts pre-COVID, during the pandemic, and in the years since. They have consistently supported our developments at pace and provide superb development expertise and long-term stewardship. We cannot speak highly enough of Shinetech's work with us. One example of this partnership is CATQR, Shinetech's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) workforce attendance, placement and competency-management solution. CATQR is used by around 25,000 staff and thousands more university students across The Royal London Hospital, St Bartholomew's Hospital and other Barts Health hospitals.
Regulated environments punish discontinuity. Every time a vendor rotates its team, the client pays for the relearning — in delay, in error, and occasionally in audit findings. Staying on one system for a decade inside an organisation of 25,000 people is not a cost-saving strategy. It is what made the system worth having when the situation changed overnight.