Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust modernised clinical correspondence by replacing its legacy dictation system with T‑Pro’s integrated speech recognition and document workflow. In under 12 months, the Trust delivered 210k+ letters, improved transcription turnaround times by 44%, and achieved 82% positive staff satisfaction.
"We needed to get letter turnaround down to 7 days to meet national standards and reduce the clinical risk caused by delayed communication,” explains James Wright, Service Improvement Practitioner at Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. “But more than that, we needed visibility and control over the process.”
The transformation extended beyond faster turnaround times. Documentation shifted from a reactive administrative task to a structured, measurable clinical process aligned with service standards and governance expectations. Performance was no longer tracked retrospectively through manual oversight but managed in real time, with clearer accountability across teams. By standardising workflows and improving transparency, the Trust strengthened operational control while ensuring correspondence supported safe, timely patient care.
Why Change Was Urgent at Bradford
Prior to 2025, Bradford Teaching Hospitals relied on an outdated Olympus dictation system that was no longer supported and offered no in-platform reporting. Letters could take several weeks to complete, creating communication bottlenecks that directly affected patient care. GPs began escalating concerns where medication could not be re‑prescribed due to delayed clinic correspondence, and some of these complaints reached executive level. The operational strain was no longer just administrative, it was clinical.
Managers had limited visibility into the true scale of the problem. Without embedded reporting tools, they relied on spreadsheets to manually track outstanding letters and identify the oldest backlog by department. There was no real-time insight into turnaround performance, making proactive intervention nearly impossible.
At the frontline, clinicians were contending with unreliable hardware and compatibility issues. Over 7 years, more than £85,000 had been spent on Dictaphones and repairs, yet device failures remained common and replacement stock inconsistent. New wireless devices were often incompatible with the legacy system, further disrupting workflows.
As one vascular consultant described it, “When the Dictaphone has a problem, it seems very difficult to repair or find a spare.”
A rheumatology consultant echoed the frustration: “I get annoyed with the current process and equipment; it is a bit of a lottery sometimes.”
Secretarial teams were equally stretched. “We get too much dictation versus the amount of people we have to type,” noted an ENT secretary, highlighting the widening gap between clinical output and administrative capacity.
At the same time, the Trust risked failing to meet NHS Standard Contract requirements mandating that clinic letters be delivered within 7 days. Without system visibility, workflow resilience, or reliable tools, the Trust faced growing compliance risk, rising frustration among staff, and increasing pressure on patient communication.
A Platform That Works the Way Clinicians Do
The Trust’s vision was clear: ensure every clinic letter is dictated, transcribed, approved, and electronically delivered within 7 days. A goal that would enhance care, reduce complaints, and support overburdened staff. But to get there, they needed a partner that could deliver
visibility, control, and speed.
In March 2025, Bradford began a phased rollout of T-Pro, replacing outdated dictation tools with a secure, cloud-based document workflow across the Trust. At the same time, real-time speech recognition was introduced immediately in 5 departments, enabling clinicians to complete letters directly from the outset. This dual approach allowed the Trust to begin reducing backlog while empowering early adopter specialties to accelerate correspondence without relying solely on transcription support.
By November 2025, T‑Pro’s solutions were live across the organisation, fully integrated into Oracle Health (Cerner Millennium).
T-Pro’s mobile-first interface was adopted predominantly across secondary care departments, enabling faster documentation at the point of care. As usage expanded across these services, secretarial backlogs declined and the approval and distribution of letters accelerated without compromising accuracy or quality. Over the same period, approval turnaround times improved by 42.6%, reflecting sustained operational performance gains across the Trust. A phased deployment model allowed each department to adapt and optimise, resulting in higher throughput and stronger digital engagement across frontline teams.
The impact was both immediate and measurable:
✔️ Outdated & complex systems were replaced with a secure, scalable and integrated platform, reducing IT complexity and enabling smoother workflows.
✔️ Transcription turnaround times were improved by 44%, enabling Bradford to consistently exceed the national 7-day target for clinic letter completion.
✔️ More than 210,000 letters generated across 39 departments post go-live
✔️ Live reporting dashboards replaced manual tracking, enabling faster, data-driven intervention.
✔️ 57% backlog reduction in departments using speech recognition, freeing up valuable admin capacity.
Departments like Urology, General Surgery and Upper GI, Colorectal led the way in performance, consistently achieving the fastest average turnaround times across the Trust, setting the benchmark for efficiency and showcasing how deeply T-Pro has been embedded
into clinical workflows.
For clinicians, the benefits went beyond metrics. T‑Pro gave staff the ability to dictate securely using any device, from smartphones to laptops, without relying on outdated hardware or transcription queues.
“As a very new consultant in the Trust, I was really dreading dictating clinic letters, and it was an extra burden on me to worry about along with everything else you worry about as a new consultant. T-Pro is amazing, it made the process so simple. My favourite thing is that I can check my letters from anywhere just using my work phone and I can keep on top of my admin in a way that I never thought would be possible” shared Katherine Lawrence, Consultant, Paediatrics, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
“Since we’ve used T-Pro, the letters that we get back from the secretaries come back a lot quicker, so our time to sign off letters and send off results back to GPs have sped up” said Kavitha Nadesalingam, Consultant, Rheumatology, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
For secretarial teams, the shift was equally significant.
“My favourite and helpful feature and mostly across the Neurology team is the voice recognition. For example, a letter that would take half an hour is now turned around within 5 minutes and that is including all the actions which need to be carried out along with the letters”, noted Aishah Abbas a Neurology Medical Secretary, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
“I would recommend it. A new system is always scary to start with. T-Pro has been a lot more user friendly than other systems we’ve had in the past and we’ve all got rolling with it quickly and it has been easy for us”, added Paige Hayes, Medical Secretary, Paediatrics, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
Nursing teams also experienced the operational impact of faster documentation and clearer communication.
“Our Vascular team have really embraced T-Pro. Even our senior colleagues adapted quickly and were not fazed by the transition. I was able to get my head around it myself in a short time, which has been positive for the whole team”, explained Sharon Senior, Clinical Nurse Specialist, Vascular, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
Even departments without access to full speech recognition saw gains through smoother dictation workflows, faster approval, and less dependence on IT troubleshooting. T‑Pro’s device-agnostic, cloud-based design enabled more mobile, responsive working for both clinical and admin teams. Having stabilised performance and embedded real-time visibility across departments, Bradford now has the platform maturity required to scale advanced documentation capabilities when the Trust is ready.
This progress directly supports the NHS 10-Year Plan’s ambition to shift from analogue to digital care delivery, placing patients at the centre while freeing up clinical time through smarter use of technology. By strengthening governance, improving operational control, and reducing avoidable administrative friction, Bradford has positioned documentation as a measurable, strategic enabler of safer and more efficient care.
About Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust delivers safe, high-quality care to communities across Bradford and beyond. Operating 5 hospital sites: Bradford Royal Infirmary, St Luke’s Hospital, Eccleshill Community Hospital, Westwood Park Community Hospital, and Westbourne Green Community Hospital, the Trust provides a full range of acute, community, and specialist services.
With over 7,600 staff, including more than 1,000 doctors and 2,000 nurses, midwives, and allied health professionals, it is one of West Yorkshire’s largest healthcare providers. Each year, the Trust manages over 520,000 outpatient appointments, performs 18,000 operations, and handles nearly 150,000 Emergency Department attendances.
As a teaching and research leader, it partners with the University of Leeds and regional organisations to train future clinicians and drive innovation in patient care.
Learn more about the Trust: https://www.bradfordhospitals.nhs.uk/
About T-Pro
T-Pro is the world’s leading AI-powered clinical documentation platform. From speech capture and dictation to ambient scribing, T-Pro streamlines the entire documentation journey, freeing clinicians from admin and accelerating communication across care teams.
Trusted by NHS Trusts across the UK and leading health systems in Ireland, T-Pro integrates seamlessly into EPR environments like Oracle Health (Cerner Millennium), providing unmatched configurability, security, and ease of use.
To discover how T-Pro can support your digital transformation from start to finish, visit https://info.tpro.io or talk to our sales team at sales@tpro.io