Amaraghosha Carter – Unsung Hero Awards

Nomination

Award Category:

IT & Digital

Individual or Team Nomination?

Individual

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 :

Headline South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust, is a regional provider of urgent and emergency care, our prime purpose is to respond to the immediate needs of our patients and to improve the health of the communities we serve As a Trust, we: • Receive and respond to 999 calls from members of the public • Respond to urgent calls from healthcare professionals e.g. GPs • Receive and response to NHS 111 calls from members of the public Amaraghosha Carter is the Associate Director of I.T for South East Coast Ambulance Service. He has had an exceptional year in both the challenges he has overcome and the resilience and professionalism he has displayed in keeping the Trust at the forefront of digital activities through one of the most turbulent and unpredictable years it has ever experienced. Amaraghosha leads an I.T Team of 53 specialists who support the Trust in providing Information Technology to in excess of 4000 staff, and in over 100 locations across Surrey, Sussex and Kent, totalling around 4000 square miles. He manages hundreds of different software applications and systems and is responsible for the whole I.T infrastructure. Many of these systems are critical systems and the impact on their failure can be catastrophic to both our staff and the Patients we serve. Due to COVID he has worked tirelessly this past year, not only in delivering day to day business as usual but also delivering reactive and immediate projects requiring a fast turnaround within a seamless transition. He has facilitated the move of over 500 staff to remote working, he has supplied hundreds of laptops, phones and wider I.T kit to Corporate Staff, Clinicians and Call Takers, to allow them to provide critical support to front line operational staff. Due to COVID Infection Control regulations he has re-configured sites, floors and buildings, whilst also de-commissioning sites at the same time in line with our Capital building projects. Amaraghosha is a well respected leader and team member, he remains calm and level headed, despite the day to challenges he is presented with. He has continued to protect the Trust from continuous external cyber activity, and works pro-actively with his team to mitigate risk and raise awareness of cyber security, and has just produced an online internal course for all staff to undertake which will promote this awareness considerably, and on top of his day job! He leads a Service Desk Team of 12 staff, who now work on a 24 hour rota to log all incidents and I.T related queries, this can relate to anything from whole system outages through to incorrect passwords – in a typical month around 3000 I.T queries will go through the service desk portal. Amaraghosha has been played an exceptional part in keeping the Trust both protected this year and functioning effectively so that all the staff have the I.T. resources they need to deliver the care to the Patients we serve. His efforts have been remarkable.