Hospitals are among the most complex environments most people will ever need to navigate — often for the first time, under considerable stress. The evidence is consistent: when patients and families cannot find where they are going, appointments are missed, staff time is diverted, and an already difficult experience becomes worse.

Language adds a further layer of complexity. Research into appointment non-attendance consistently identifies language barriers as a contributing factor — particularly in urban NHS trusts serving diverse communities. Navigation and language barriers are often compounded: a family that cannot read the signage and cannot find a member of staff to ask faces a double obstacle that standard wayfinding infrastructure does nothing to address.

The burden falls on clinical staff too. Junior doctors routinely report getting lost on the way to urgent calls — with ward names offering little geographic indication of their actual location.

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The RHCYP facility

The Royal Hospital for Children and Young People is NHS Lothian's tertiary paediatric hospital at the Edinburgh BioQuarter. Opened as the successor to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Sciennes following a £150 million construction project, the facility spans six floors with 242 beds across 10 wards — over 60% of them single en-suite rooms — plus 10 operating theatres, a paediatric critical care unit, and a helideck.

Despite being a modern, purpose-built facility, the RHCYP is genuinely difficult to navigate. Its scale, multi-floor layout, shared campus with the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, and ward names drawn from Scottish castles create real difficulty for first-time visitors. The internal survey result — 40% of families needing wayfinding assistance — was the documented starting point for this project.

There was also a defining technical constraint: the building has poor GPS and mobile signal throughout. Any solution relying on GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, or cellular data would not function reliably inside the RHCYP.

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How the project came about

This deployment started with a clinician, not a procurement process. Dr Olivia Swann identified wayfinding as a direct drain on clinical time and a source of avoidable distress for families. She researched available solutions and identified Waymap as the only viable option that could operate without GPS, Wi-Fi, or cellular signal — all of which are unreliable inside the RHCYP.

Dr Swann brought the proposal to Roslyn Neely, CEO of Edinburgh Children's Hospital Charity. ECHC secured the funding, worked with Waymap to make the cost accessible for an NHS setting, and NHS Lothian's senior leadership gave the project their backing.

For Waymap, Edinburgh represented our entry into healthcare — a sector we had long identified as well suited to infrastructure-free navigation, but one that requires the right institutional partner to enter responsibly. Following the RHCYP deployment, Waymap is now in discussions with healthcare providers in North America and Singapore.

Establishing the evidence base

The RHCYP deployment went live on 11 February 2026. A formal pre–post evaluation study, led by the University of Edinburgh, is currently underway. This makes the RHCYP one of the few hospital navigation deployments anywhere to be subject to independent academic peer review — a standard of evidence that most wayfinding solutions in the healthcare sector do not reach.

The University of Edinburgh evaluation was commissioned as part of the deployment from the outset — not retrospectively. Independent academic assessment of impact on wayfinding confidence, appointment attendance, and staff time is in progress. Results will be published and made available on request. This case study will be updated upon publication of those findings.

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Early user feedback

Early feedback from families at the RHCYP reflects the practical impact the app was designed to have. Gilly Bain, whose daughters have been admitted to the hospital on multiple occasions with recurrent respiratory conditions, described the difference it makes at the moment of highest stress: