IT Services Team – Unsung Hero Awards

Nomination

Award Category:

IT & Digital

Individual or Team Nomination?

Team

Qualifying Qualities

In these challenging times, nominators were asked to show how the nominee had demonstrated the following qualities:

Exceptional work ethic - going above and beyond their job description, especially in the past 12 months.
Outstanding achievement/s in work or outside of the organisation where relevant.
Drive for innovation and proactive leadership in these challenging times.
High level of interpersonal skills, such as kindness, empathy, loyalty and thoughtfulness to staff and patients.
A resilience considering Covid to their role and to the health and wellbeing of their colleagues.

Nominators Answer

Nominee's story :

From the outset of the pandemic the Trust’s IT Services Team have been instrumental in enabling and supporting the Trust’s digital response. Throughout this difficult and challenging time, the team has continuously provided an exceptionally high-class service. Over recent years the IT Services has made giant strides through a well-co-ordinated programme of infrastructure modernisation delivered via a number of major projects which has served to provide a safe, resilient and modernised IT network that has remained both accessible to staff whilst maintaining expected levels of responsiveness. This has helped to improve the speed of how staff access both Trust systems and the Internet from their computers, reducing system unavailability due to IT failures, improved network performance, introduced better systems monitoring and reducing associated costs. This major undertaking has helped the Trust to build a more digital-enabled environment, whilst enhancing security measures which help to keep us all safe and maintaining the quality front line clinical services provided to our service users. A lot of this work generally goes on unnoticed behind the scenes, therefore it is not visible to staff and just tends to happen in the background. Key achievements • Supported significant increase in demand for Trust staff to work from home through issue of additional IT equipment within a 2-3- week window at the start of the outbreak, specifically: o 350 additional laptops o 100 desktops Wi-Fi enabled for staff to work from home o 1,300 additional VPN tokens (33% increase in Trust estate) resulting in o 4,000 daily VPN connections (a 10 fold increase when compared to pre-covid volumetrics) o 250 additional voice-only mobile phones and 100 additional smartphones issued o Reconfiguration of key network infrastructure to support increased demand for VPN and video conferencing based services, doubling available bandwidth through reconfiguration of business continuity infrastructure. • Enabled the rapid deployment of video conferencing/consultation solutions. o 1,000 additional Skype for Business licences and additional telephone dial-in capacity to meet increased demand. o Airmid: Video consultations linked to SystmOne record averaging circa 950 consultations in the last 12 months. o AccuRX: Alternative video consultation solution averaging circa 9,000 consultations in the last 12 months. o Microsoft Teams: Approaching 24,000 clinical video consultations (including groups) in the last 12 months. • Rapid deployment of Microsoft Teams across the Trust with 5,500 accounts created across the Trust to support enhanced collaboration providing video conferencing and messaging capabilities, which saw SWYPFT become an early adopter of Teams which was particularly impressive as the Trust manages its own Microsoft tenant and doesn’t use the centrally provided solution linked to NHS Mail. Annual usage stats for Microsoft Teams within the Trust are: - o Over 140,000 1:1 calls o Over 275,000 meetings participated in o In excess of 1.3m messages sent using Microsoft Teams This is made all the more impressive by the fact the team did it whilst dealing with the general day requirements of the Trust which saw them deal with around 60,000 tickets last year.