COVID made Infrastructure king

What did we do during the last year when so many were unable to work? Well apart from gaining weight and catching Covid, we probably had our busiest time enabling the NHS to continue to provide the outstanding service to those in need. This isn’t to compare what we have done to the sacrifices that have been made by frontline workers during this pandemic but to offer insight into how we helped.

On March 16^th 2020 life in the UK changed for everyone. What this meant was that all non-essential staff were sent to work from home. Now the NHS has usually seen working from home as a privilege and not a right and was therefore ill prepared for such a shift in working practices.

What did this teach us?

Infrastructure was king. This broke down into key initiatives that DEC was helping drive:

• Network – This was now imperative to all initiatives. Not just to facilitate home working but to enable greater mobile working onsite.
• PC Upgrade and an increase in the number of laptops deployed at pace. As employees worked from home it was imperative that the Trust provided the right equipment to users to continue their work in providing treatment to patients that could no longer be seen at the hospital.
• Office 365 – We had already begun rolling out Office 365 to users but this needed to be ramped up significantly. Clinicians needed Teams to continue vital Multi-Disciplinary Team Meetings (MDT’s) where patient diagnoses where discussed and treatments agreed. These were usually done face to face or via expensive AV solutions that connected hospitals not individuals. Rapid training and culture change was needed to enable these features.

These on top of VDI upgrades and other major work that the Trust staff carried out at pace and it has been a monumental year in NHS IT and it doesn’t stop. Such is the way of the ‘New Normal’ that initiatives are being discussed all the time.

Organisations are coming to DEC weekly asking for Digital Maturity Assessments and Digital Roadmaps. Each organisation is different with unique challenges and at DEC we pride ourselves on being technology agnostic therefore we provide a tailored roadmap.