When the Care Quality Commission visits a hospital its team looks at every aspect of the way care is delivered, but in order to focus on the things that matter most to patients it concentrates on five 'Key lines of enquiry'. They want to know whether the services they inspect are safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. At Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, the Quality First Team is working hard on these questions, to analyse performance and drive improvements wherever they can be made. This inevitably produces a huge amount of data for the Management Board to digest.

In Media Studio we have been working closely with the Quality First Team to distil and present the KLOE information in a form that is easy to understand at a glance. Our human brains are much better at retaining visual information than storing and remembering numbers and text, so the primary objective of information design is to present facts and figures in a way that makes the best use of our abilities.