Designing and building a comprehensive NHS Trust website for Kingston Hospital — managing patient information across every department, with a unified WordPress CMS, an advanced patient leaflet system, and full WCAG accessibility compliance throughout.
Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is a major acute hospital serving a population of around 350,000 people across Kingston upon Thames and the surrounding area. The trust provides a broad range of inpatient, outpatient, and emergency services, alongside specialist services including maternity care. With dozens of clinical departments, hundreds of consultants, and a constantly growing library of patient leaflets and publications, Kingston Hospital needed a robust NHS website that could manage and present high volumes of patient information clearly and accessibly — for patients, carers, and clinical staff across every service.
Kingston Hospital's existing website was not built to handle the depth and volume of information an NHS Trust of its size needs to communicate. Content management across departments was fragmented and manual, making it difficult to keep patient-facing information accurate and up-to-date.
The trust needed a single NHS website platform to serve as the hub for all departmental and patient-facing content while also giving Kingston Maternity its own distinct presence — without creating additional management burden or inconsistency across the brand.
Without a unified CMS, keeping departmental content accurate across an NHS Trust of this scale required significant manual effort — increasing the risk of outdated information reaching patients.
Kingston Maternity needed its own distinct identity within the NHS Trust website — a dedicated space that the existing setup had no way of supporting.
Patient leaflets were not searchable or easily accessible online — limiting patients' ability to find the clinical information they needed before and after treatment.
The existing NHS website did not meet current WCAG accessibility standards, excluding patients with visual impairments, cognitive difficulties, or other access needs.
Consultant profiles and department-specific content had to be updated manually across multiple pages — a time-consuming process prone to inconsistency across the Trust.
A thorough review of the trust's full content requirements — mapping departments, consultant structures, patient leaflet categories, and publication types to define the NHS website architecture from the ground up.
A unified WordPress CMS to manage the main Kingston Hospital NHS website and Kingston Maternity from a single backend — with custom post types, structured fields, and clearly separated content areas for each section.
WCAG accessibility compliance was built into the NHS website from the start — not added at the end — ensuring every patient, regardless of ability, can access the information they need.
Rather than working around an outdated structure, we approached this as a complete NHS website development project — building a custom WordPress CMS architecture capable of managing the trust's scale of content dynamically, accessibly, and with minimal ongoing burden on the internal team.
The solution covered every layer of the NHS website — from WordPress CMS architecture and custom post types through to the patient leaflet system and WCAG accessibility tooling. The result is a structured, manageable platform that reflects the scale of Kingston Hospital's operations without burdening the communications team.
Unified WordPress CMS Implementation
A single WordPress CMS managing the full Kingston Hospital NHS website and Kingston Maternity — with custom post types for departments, consultants, news, and publications, keeping all content clearly organised and easy for the team to maintain.
Dynamic content display
A dedicated system for reading, downloading, and printing patient leaflets — with advanced search and filtering by department and tags, making critical patient information instantly accessible across the NHS Trust website.
Patient leaflet system
A single WordPress CMS managing the full Kingston Hospital NHS website and Kingston Maternity — with custom post types for departments, consultants, news, and publications, keeping all content clearly organised and easy for the team to maintain.
WCAG accessibility panel
A site-wide accessibility panel on every page — covering adjustable text sizes, contrast settings, and screen reader compatibility — ensuring the NHS website meets WCAG standards and is usable by all patients.
Custom fields for structured layouts
Custom fields enabling step-by-step layout generation across departmental pages — giving the NHS communications team a structured, consistent way to build and update content independently.
The unified WordPress CMS allows seamless management of the Kingston Hospital NHS website and Kingston Maternity from a single interface — reducing editorial workload and ensuring consistency across the full Trust.
Custom post types and dynamic content display keep departments, consultants, and publications well-organised across the NHS Trust website — automatically surfacing information in the right context and reducing manual updates.
The patient leaflet system makes it straightforward for patients and staff to locate, download, and print the information they need — searchable by department and tag across the full document library.
The integrated WCAG accessibility panel — covering text resizing, contrast adjustment, and screen reader support — ensures the NHS website is compliant, inclusive, and usable by patients with a wide range of needs.
The new Kingston Hospital NHS website transformed how the trust communicates with its patients — delivering a reliable, accessible, and well-organised digital presence that supports clinical operations and improves the online experience for every user.
The NHS communications team can now manage all departmental content, consultant listings, and publications from a single WordPress CMS — saving significant time and reducing the risk of outdated patient information reaching the public.
The patient leaflet system ensures that critical pre- and post-care guidance is always available online — reducing reliance on printed materials and supporting patients in managing their own care between appointments.
By embedding WCAG accessibility features across every page of the NHS website, the platform now serves the full breadth of Kingston Hospital's patient community — including those with visual, cognitive, or motor impairments.
Kingston Maternity now has a dedicated section within the unified NHS website — giving maternity patients a tailored, relevant experience while maintaining brand consistency across the full Trust.
By building a unified WordPress CMS from the ground up, we gave Kingston Hospital the NHS website infrastructure it needed to manage complex, high-volume patient information efficiently — and deliver it accessibly to every user. The platform supports the trust's clinical teams, serves patients more effectively, and provides a stable, scalable foundation for ongoing NHS digital development.
