Executive Summary

East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust (EEAST) provides emergency and urgent care across Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. Like most NHS Trusts, its Information Governance team is responsible for maintaining a Record of Processing Activities (RoPA) that is accurate, current and fit for scrutiny by the Senior Information Risk Owner (SIRO) and Information Asset Owners (IAOs) across a large and operationally busy organisation.

Before adopting the ProvePrivacy platform, the Trust’s RoPA lived on a system that was too granular for day to day use and offered no single view of the organisation’s processing activities. Since moving to ProvePrivacy, the Information Governance team has replaced a slow, confusing process with one that owners can use without a guide, and reporting that senior stakeholders can rely on at any time.

Quick Facts

• Organisation: East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust
• Sector: NHS Ambulance Trust, public sector
• Team using the platform: Information Governance
• Core use case: Record of Processing Activities (RoPA) management and reporting
• Status: Early stage deployment, with Data Champions and risk review planned next

The Challenge: A RoPA Nobody Could Use Easily

Before working with ProvePrivacy, the Trust held its RoPA on a different system. It did the job in theory, but not in practice. The structure was too granular for the people who actually had to use it, and entering information correctly required a guide just to find the right section.

That granularity had a second cost. It stood in the way of oversight. The Information Governance team wanted a single, full picture of the Trust’s processing activities that the SIRO and IAOs could review easily, rather than a system that buried that picture across many disconnected entries.

Underneath both problems was the same resource pressure every NHS Information Governance team recognises: time. The old system was time consuming and difficult to understand, which meant maintaining it competed directly with everything else a lean team is asked to do. There was no single incident, breach or audit that forced the change. It was the accumulated weight of a system that made basic compliance work harder than it needed to be.

The Search and Selection: Choosing Simplicity Over Complexity

When the Trust looked at the market, the pattern it ran into elsewhere was a familiar one: cost and complexity. Enterprise alternatives asked for a lot in both areas without a clear payoff in ease of use.

ProvePrivacy stood out for the opposite reason. After a few demonstrations, the team was consistently drawn to how straightforward the platform was to use. The deciding factor was not a long feature list. It was simplicity, and the fact that the people who would actually own sections of the RoPA could understand what was being asked of them without extensive training.

The Solution in Action: Owning the Data from Day One

Rather than have historical data migrated across automatically, the Trust chose to input its RoPA into ProvePrivacy itself. Given how tangled the previous system had become, the team was not confident that an automated transfer would map cleanly, and wanted certainty that the information going in was correct and up to date.

That decision meant training mattered. The Information Governance team found the process of learning the platform and entering data straightforward, with support available throughout, including weekly drop in sessions until the team was fully comfortable working independently.

Today, access sits with the Information Governance team while the Trust builds towards its next step: extending a Data Champions model out into operational teams, so that ownership of keeping the RoPA current and accurate is shared more widely rather than resting with one central team.

The Results So Far: Confidence Before the Numbers

EEAST is still in the early stages of its ProvePrivacy deployment, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than reaching for results the data does not yet support. The Trust has not yet drawn on quantified time savings from an incident, breach or Subject Access Request, and its work reviewing risk within the platform is still under way.

What has already changed is confidence. Having reporting available at any time has increased senior stakeholders’ confidence in the Trust’s RoPA, and it has strengthened conversations inside the Information Governance team too. As the team’s familiarity with the platform has grown, it updates the RoPA more quickly and adds new activities with more assurance that the record reflects reality. That is the foundation the Trust is now building on as it extends Data Champions and its risk review work through the rest of this year.

The Testimonial

The simplicity of the platform, being able to work through sections of the activity at your own time and pace, and the ease of having the reporting functionality available in the system has helped time and report writing.

— Information Governance team, East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust

Asked to sum up the impact of ProvePrivacy in three words, the team chose: straightforward, user friendly, accessible.

About ProvePrivacy

ProvePrivacy is a data protection compliance platform built to give lean teams the oversight of a large compliance function without the cost or complexity that usually comes with it. This case study was compiled by Mark Roebuck, founder of ProvePrivacy, drawing on more than 25 years of data protection and information governance experience.