Benefits analysis

To put in a new network connection into all the required locations would be time consuming and costly to implement.

By sharing the existing connections and switches, which were in place within the locations, saved £367,500 on year one costs, and £89,000 in ongoing yearly costs.

Staff mileage cost reduced by £100,000 over 5 years. While some of this saving will be down to reduced travel because staff had appropriate devices to work, some must also be attributed to COVID. However, with staff having laptops with 4G SIMs and the option for home working, during COVID our community services were well equipped to isolate where required.

Since taking on community services and implementing the network, there was a reduction in clinical related IT incidents which were logged about connectivity loss or failure of IT equipment. This contributed to the overall reduction of incidents raised over the year.

This can be attributed to staff having better connections out in the community and more reliable hardware. Many of the remaining incidents are attributed to server or system outages.

The number of service desk calls for community services has also reduced over the years since the network was implemented. Password resets have been excluded from the figures, as a new software solution was implemented in 2019/20, which reduced the total number of calls received which had no link to the deployment of the network solution.

On reviewing the details of the calls, there was a clear reduction in the number of jobs logged in the following categories:

• wrong supplier – calls to our service desk for staff who were still using CSU service while we transferred
• hardware failure/re-image – we had to rebuild less devices due to newer hardware being deployed
• reduction in support tickets raised about home working/VPN
• reduction in support tickets about connection issues at other NHS locations