Moving up a league: Newham signs Premier Support
Newham University Hospital NHS Trust is one of an increasing number of NHS organisations to sign up for Microsoft Premier Support. Lyn Whitfield finds out why.
Newham University Hospital NHS Trust is a busy acute trust based at Newham General in east London.
Its IT department has around 2,000 staff to support; and for the past two years, it has also provided services to its local primary care trust. NHS Newham employs another 1,000 staff at 23 sites, while a further thousand or so are employed at 65 GP practices and other primary care services.
“On 1 July 2007, we became a shared service, providing a service to NHS Newham, which is a completely different proposition,” says ICT operations manager Shaun Jeffery.
“With the acute trust, we are dealing with an organisation that is campus based. Whereas with the PCT we are looking at around 100 sites spread across a whole London borough. Plus, the PCT has more mobile working and remote working.”
“Having doubled our estate with no more funding or people, we needed help.”
Mr Jeffery has a small team to do all this work. “We have four front-line technicians, ten second-line technicians and four people working for Egton Medical Information Services, which provides [the products of GP systems supplier] EMIS to local GP surgeries,” he counts.
“We also have three people looking after our networks and three doing systems administration. That’s not a lot of people; and having doubled our estate with no more funding or people, we needed help.” To get that help, Mr Jeffery turned to Microsoft Premier Support.
Help and support
Premier Support is organised around six ‘key service elements’: support account management (which makes sure that the account is well run); problem resolution (access to help 24/7); additional support and assistance; information services; workshops; and prevention and resolution resources (or help with more strategic issues).
Matt Nelson, a service executive in Microsoft UK’s public sector team, says it is often the reactive help and support elements that attract customers initially. “Trusts often look at the problem resolution support and grab this as an insurance policy,” he says.
Mr Jeffery certainly found the 24/7 problem resolution handy. “On the day we signed the contract, we had to place a call,” he says, explaining how a SQL database built by an enthusiast in one of the hospital’s clinical departments corrupted.
“We picked up the telephone to our new technical account manager and the service we got was absolutely fantastic. It was a tough problem to fix and it was escalated within Microsoft to someone extremely knowledgeable about SQL.”
Over time, however, Mr Nelson says that trusts make more use of the proactive, strategic elements of Premier Support, and Mr Jeffery certainly hopes that Newham will do this. “The first year of the contract is a taster. Next year, we want to make it bigger,” he says.
Improving infrastructure
“If we had spent the money on another member of staff, we would have had a productivity lift, but we would not have had the breadth or depth of knowledge that we have got from Premier.”
Newham has made a start on looking at its infrastructure and key systems. “We have done an Active Directory risk and health assessment programme (RAP),” says Mr Jeffery. “We had a consultant on site for three and a half days to do some fantastic work for us on our use of Active Directory and how we might improve it.
“My team really appreciated the help this gave them. We resolved some issues that were high risk and have worked from there.”
Newham has also done a SQL RAP to help it to rationalise its SQL estate. “One organisation had a single SQL instance, while the other organisation had six,” says Mr Jeffery. “So we had some people to examine SQL and they highlighted some high risks with our estate.
“We used this as a reason to employ a SQL database administrator. Now, we are not only rationalising but looking to move SQL forward. We want a single instance in our environment and to make sure it is resilient.”
A direct relationship with Microsoft
The key feature of Premier Support is that customers get a direct relationship with Microsoft through a technical account manager or TAM – in Newham’s case Kelly Axon-Langhorn.
The TAM makes sure that help and support calls are dealt with, that customers know about workshops and other events that they might be interested in, and works with customers to map out challenges and ways of overcoming them.
Having this direct relationship with Microsoft was a big attraction for Mr Jeffery. “Microsoft has the biggest Enterprise Agreement in history [with the NHS] so it makes sense to have a relationship with them,” he says.
“If we had spent the money that we have spent on Premier Support on another member of staff, we would have had a productivity lift, but we would have had more overhead as well – and we would not have had the breadth or depth of knowledge that we have got from Premier.”
Next year, Mr Jeffery wants to make sure that everybody with management responsibility in his team has been through the Office of Government Commerce’s ITIL v3 qualification scheme (ITIL – the Information Technology Infrastructure Library – is a set of concepts and policies for managing IT operations and developments designed to improve the management of IT in the public sector).
He also wants to conduct an operations strategic review “to look at what we do as a management function and how to improve the service we provide, using Microsoft models of best practice.” This, he says, is all part of “looking at what we have to make sure we are using it in the best way – the most ergonomical way – that we can.”
Looking to the future
NHS IT departments are likely to come under increasing pressure to ‘do more with less’ as NHS budgets tighten after 2011, when the health service’s comprehensive spending review settlement with the Treasury runs out, and a new government is likely to be looking for savings.
At the same time, however, they will need to be able to show their managerial and clinical colleagues how IT can be used to make services more efficient without reducing their safety or quality.
Mr Jeffery hopes that Newham’s investment in Premier Support and his team’s development will help it to cope with these complex demands. “The frustrations of many people in my position are the same,” he says. “Public sector bodies think IT is just there and it should work.
“You have to work hard just to meet that expectation, so you can get stuck in dealing with the day-to-day, when you need to be looking forward and driving your part of the business. If we can get more organised and more professional, then hopefully that will be picked up by business managers outside IT. If we can do that, they should have more confidence in us.”
Find out more
Microsoft has a number of services that can support NHS IT teams.
To find out how Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust has benefited from Premier Support, read our case study.
For more information please contact Matt Nelson, our Premier Service Executive.