Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust streamlines working practices for 5,000 staff with modern IT infrastructure from Civica
Active Directory solution enables merged hospitals to prepare for National Programme for IT
16 March 2005, London… Civica plc, one of the UK’s most experienced providers of consulting, software and services for the public sector, has completed the first phase of a programme to create a common IT infrastructure for 5,000 staff at Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust.
The project - which is due for completion later this month - comprised an upgrade to Microsoft Windows Server and Exchange 2003 across the Trust’s different sites to allow integrated working and cross-site information sharing by all departmental personnel. This common platform will help the Trust prepare for the NHS National Programme for IT and its key components such as the Care Record Service (CRS), and the Patient Record System due in 2006.
Formed in 2003 from the merger of South Buckinghamshire NHS Trust and Stoke Mandeville Hospital NHS Trust, Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust comprises Amersham, Stoke Mandeville and Wycombe Hospitals. It provides a wide range of acute services to an area which is home to 500,000 people. For spinal injuries the Trust serves a much larger population of 14 million.
In delivering a new common directory, Civica’s IT consultancy and integration team has eradicated the Trust’s need for duplicated files and email systems. During the migration, Civica operated parallel systems to support users.
The second phase of file migration is set to commence in April, and ultimately the project will see the Trust transfer as much as 1.5 terabytes of data to new high capacity servers at Wycombe and Stoke Mandeville.
John Blakesley, Director of Operations at Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust, said, “This is the most ambitious IT project we have undertaken to date. Upgrading our existing multiple IT domains has resulted in a single integrated environment where users can log on to any computer at any site and see their desktop, files and emails, with the appropriate security measures being in place.
This will provide a vastly improved ability to access information from the Trust’s different sites and departments. Most of all, it means that we can work as a single unit, ensuring more efficient working practices in the future.”
He added, “The upgrade is a fundamental step towards achieving readiness for the new National Care Records Service, which will allow the appropriate staff to view a patient’s full healthcare history online by 2010.”
Steve Reynolds, Civica Services managing director, said: “We are very pleased to be assisting Buckinghamshire Hospitals with such a key infrastructure project. Pragmatic programmes such as these are imperative to support improvements in patient services. With our company’s long experience of working in the healthcare sector at the local level, we are committed to helping customers streamline the administrative and operational management aspects of care.”
About Civica plc
Civica (www.civica.co.uk) is one of the UK’s most experienced providers of consulting, software systems and managed services to the public sector. The company has a 20-year history of supplying local government, police, healthcare, criminal justice and education organisations in the UK, Australia and the USA. UK customers include approximately 75 per cent of local authorities, 47 of the 53 police forces, more than 250 NHS Trusts and over 30 Local Education Authorities, while in Australia the group is one of the leading local government software suppliers. Civica Services Ltd is an approved prime contractor for software in the Catalist (formerly GCat) government procurement catalogue. Overall the company employs approximately 550 people and has a recent track record of profits growth.
About Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust
Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust (www.buckshospitals.nhs.uk) was established in April 2003 following the formal merger of South Buckinghamshire NHS Trust and Stoke Mandeville Hospital NHS Trust. The Trust serves residents in Buckinghamshire, Thame (Oxfordshire), Tring (Hertfordshire) and Leighton Buzzard (Bedfordshire) – a combined population of 500,000. The Trust serves a much larger population of 1.5 million for Burns and Plastic Services and 14 million for Spinal Injuries. Three Primary Care Trusts are responsible for commissioning this population (except for Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire patients); Vale of Aylesbury PCT; Chiltern and South Bucks PCT; and Wycombe PCT.