Infrastructure upgrade at North Cumbria Acute Hospitals trust - video case studies

In these video case studies, senior managers from North Cumbria Acute Hospitals trust talk about the many benefits they expect from upgrading to a modern and consistent IT infrastructure, built on Microsoft technologies.

The Microsoft partners who helped them to deploy the new platform also talk about the process and how they managed to avoid disrupting the trust’s 24/7 operation. 

North Cumbria Acute Hospitals trust covers one of the largest geographical areas of any trust in England. It decided to upgrade its infrastructure to a modern and consistent platform, built on Microsoft technologies.

The benefits of a new infrastructure

The trust was looking for a number of benefits from the upgrade. It wanted a faster and more stable infrastructure that would be ready for the National Programme for IT in the NHS and support the deployment of PACs and other systems.

It wanted an infrastructure that would allow it to create a more consistent desktop infrastructure that would easier for staff to use and the IT team to support. And it wanted to improve communications, both between its main hospital campuses in Carlisle and Whitehaven and across the wider health economy.

“The informatics service is being asked to deliver the biggest agenda it’s ever delivered,” says trust head of informatics Steve Sewell.

“That is being driven by national drivers such as Connecting for Health [the agency in charge of the national programme] and its agenda of making sure that information is available when it is required, by whom it is required, wherever they may be.

“This also supports the aim of the trust to reach foundation status within two years, and a lot of the NHS’ key imperatives at the moment, such as Payment by Results and Choose and Book. ICT is becoming a key driver in the NHS, more than it has ever been in the past.”

A pan-North Cumbria IM&T programme board was set up to bring together all the organisations that needed to be involved in the project, chaired by Marie Burnham, the trust’s chief executive.

It reviewed a number of options before deciding to base the new computing environment on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003.

This allowed the trust to take advantage of the enterprise agreement signed between the company and NHS CFH, while providing it with a consistent, flexible and extensible platform.

Planning and deployment

The server infrastructure for the new platform was installed at three main sites, two in Carlisle and one in Whitehaven. To help with the migration, two Microsoft partners, Associated Network Solutions and Quest Software, were engaged.

ANS Group has experience with both Novell - from which the trust was migrating - and Microsoft technologies. It has also worked with the trust for a number of years. Quest provided software tools to assist with the migration.

“Like all our customers, North Cumbria had never done a migration before, and it is pretty daunting task for any IT department,” says Joe Baguley, global product director of Quest Software UK.

“At that time you look around to find people who have done it before, and Quest tools have been used to migrate over 18 million people to Active Directory and Exchange. Once they had found us and [set up] the partnership with ANS, it really was quite straightforward for them.”

The biggest risk in the migration was downtime. “In order to minimise [that] we approach the migration in several steps,” Damon Hoggett, trust IT consultant.

“We do a lot of pre-migration work - pre-flight checks as we call them - to identify how much data there is to transfer, who is in a work-group, which people we need to transfer across. We do some basic set-up work on the PC ahead of the migration itself. 

“Then we will, overnight usually, migrate the email and any data on the servers that needs to go across. And on the day itself we will go out to the user and check their PC. We will also have a trainer available in case they need any handholding.”

At the end of the process, he is confident that users will also see the benefit of the new platform. “They will have a more seamless environment across North Cumbria, including a single log-on wherever they go.”

Watch the case study videos produced by GBTV:

North Cumbria Acute Hospitals trust benefits from a new IT infrastructure (2006, 5 minutes 30 seconds): Play the video

North Cumbria Acute Hospitals trust manages a trouble free upgrade (2006, 7 minutes): Play the video

Related links:

Review more information about ANS Group

Review more information about Quest Software and its tools for database, application and Windows management