NHS Tayside
Download: NHS Tayside
PROJECT HEADLINE
The future looks “healthy” for ICT @ NHS Tayside.
PROJECT SPEC AND RESULT IN A SENETENCE
Capito delivers stability and continuity through Microsoft Active Directory services to NHS Tayside.
INDUSTRY
National Health Service
SIZE
22 Hospitals and 3,000 staff benefit from new AD implementation across Tayside Health region.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
NHS Tayside required to migrate from disparate and mature environments to a single directory structure allowing it to undertake greater collaboration and communication across its full health region. This undertaking required to be done seamlessly with no impact on their lifesaving services to the citizens of Perth & Kinross, Angus and the City of Dundee.
SOLUTION
Having undertaken a strategic evaluation of appropriate products, NHS Tayside engaged with Capito to design, plan, manage and implement the deployment of a Microsoft Active Directory structure across all its 22 hospitals, including the Dundee University medical school at its flagship Ninewells.
RESULTS
- Full implementation undertaken within six months.
- NHS Tayside already realising significant cost savings.
- Seamless transition bringing instant benefits.
- Project delivered on budget.
- Enhanced communications improving patient service.
INTEREST AREAS
Technical Consultancy. NHS. Active Directory.
KEY SERVICES
Capito Technical Consultancy Services.
CORE TECHNOLOGIES
Microsoft Active Directory 2003
"Capito were awarded this contract as a company who understand this market place and engage and deliver the services required by the Health region. To date this engagement has realised savings in excess of £580,000 by consistently delivering and assisting NHS Tayside in both its budget and timeline objectives"
Customer overview
NHS Tayside is one of the fourteen health regions within NHS Scotland, providing healthcare services for over 400,000 thousand citizens within three Scottish Local Authority regions, Angus, City of Dundee & Perth and Kinross.
NHS Tayside’s governance includes a total of 22 major and community hospitals, including the University of Dundee’s Medical School attached to the regions flagship institute, Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. It also includes over 75 GP surgeries and a variety of health centres staffed by over 30,000 employees of the health region.
Business need
"The most important policy issue facing European Governments over the next 50 years is how to cope with ageing populations...For Scotland the future is now... its population is ageing faster and dying quicker than any other industrialised nation"
The Scottish Report - Scotland the Grave? (2003)
This report generated by the Scottish Executive acknowledged that the NHS in Scotland needed to change to reflect these new challenges and that they needed to act now to ensure they could address the rapidly emerging requirements of its citizens. As part of this action they engaged Professor David Kerr, a leading health expert and Government advisor, to undertake a consultation programme. This programme termed “Building a Health Service Fit for the Future”. reported back to the Scottish Government, with its findings published in 2005.
Whilst there were many aspects within this report, one major recommendation was the need for “a greater integration of services & systems within the NHS.”
This point in particular resonated with NHS Tayside and was the catalyst for reviewing their current ICT environment and aligning their solution more closely with the NHS Scotland e-Health Strategy.
As part of a continuity of service across what is a significant physical size of region (Approx 4000 Square Miles) and the wide distribution of institutes within its estate, the Authority sought an ICT provider to undertake consultancy, design and implementation of a recognised directory structure which would allow for ease of communication, collaboration and workflow, and thus deliver against the recommendations of Professor Kerr’s report.
How Capito helped
At the outset, NHS Tayside had a number of different directories and structures such as; Novell NDS, multiple Windows Active Directory Services and Windows NT domains, none of which were integrated.
Furthermore the OS being utilised were nearing “end of life” with a limitation on future support. This was also coupled with the fact that it was becoming increasingly more difficult to support the hardware running these operating systems.
As such, in November 2006, the Trust awarded Capito the project to evaluate the full current infrastructure setup and produce a plan to migrate the existing users over to this newly selected solution within an aggressive timeframe to coincide with other Trust initiatives.
The engagement began with an initial scoping exercise, which also included a “printing discovery” project, to establish a starting position and assist with the design of the final solution. Working closely with the clients ICT teams, sign-off was agreed on the design and phased approach to the project.
From here Capito undertook the remote construction and implementation of an Active Directory as the first step on the desired migration program.
Once this directory structure was constructed, installed and tested against the live environment in pilot conditions, the phased migration of equipment, users and data over from the existing Novell environment commenced. Part of this undertaking also included the integration of the Trusts existing enterprise wide back-up solution, to ensure this new robust & reliable infrastructure within AD could be stored and accessed in line with IT Policy.
This full exercise was undertaken and completed in a six month transition program which involved each significant site being integrated in a rolling manner. To assist with such an undertaking Capito deployed complementary floor-walking teams to assist users with any initial transfer problems.
At the completion of this exercise 3,000 users were successfully and seamlessly migrated across from the old set-up onto the new Active Directory infrastructure.
Results
With this rollout, NHS Tayside has successfully achieved its initial objectives with respect to:
- Desktop Security & Control.
- Provision of a scalable enterprise directory.
- Improved user mobility.
- Login Standardisation.
This has therefore allowed NHS Tayside to build from this foundation and prepare to integrate all its 75 GP surgeries and a further 16,000 staff into its domain in a controlled and consistent manner.