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Mid Staffs NHS

Mid Staffs NHS | Cheshire Council | Trafford Borough Council

Centralised application deployment and data management

The business issue: Mid Staffs General Hospitals Trust provides 650 acute beds and healthcare services on 2 sites - Cannock Chase Hospital and Staffordshire General Hospital.

The Trust were faced with the problem of maintaining and developing a computing environment consisting of many disparate systems and departmental servers. Additionally, a population of mixed-specification PCs presented difficulties with deploying applications and in offering effective end-user support.

Our Approach: After conducting a successful pilot project, a&o implemented a server-based computing solution for the Trust. This allowed a standard set of applications to be used by all users across both locations. In addition, a centralized storage system was deployed to manage all user and application data under a common management platform. The resulting infrastructure allows all computing services to be managed in a cost effective and flexible manner.

Key Benefits: A core element of the a&o solution was a centralised ‘server farm’. This comprised application and data servers configured in a space-efficient rack-mounted format.

The Trust’s standard application suite is published to the existing population of 600 PCs using Citrix MetaFrame technology. By virtue of the fact that these are installed centrally, administration costs and effort and significantly reduced.

Increased Productivity: The key benefit delivered by the solution is the ability to deploy new applications across the Trust quickly and with minimal effort. End users benefit from being able to access these applications and information from any point on the network. Furthermore, they are able to use the latest office productivity tools, gain access to the Internet and share information with colleagues more easily than before.

In common with many organisations, the Trust has a high ratio of users to support staff. With the Citrix technology they now have the ability to ‘shadow’ users - which enables direct assistance to be offered as problems are raised. This improves the efficiency of the IT staff and reduces the delay in resolving support issues. In addition, routine maintenance tasks need only to be carried out on the central servers. Security and reliability are improved as a result, with less need to manage a distributed population of PCs

Improved Management of critical data: Using a high-speed storage network, the Trust has connected all key servers to the centralised disk storage system. Mission critical data such as patient records, pathology database and e-mail are retained on a single high performance, scalable platform. By consolidating disk resources in this fashion, the Trust have benefited from improved economies of scale. In addition, backup and archival policies are easier to implement using a enterprise-wide data management platform and high capacity automated tape library.

Bob Weaver, IT Manager - Mid Staffs General Hospitals Trust commented: “We were in no doubt that a&o had the skills necessary to implement such an important project for the Trust.”