Network requirements

The first step the trust took was to look at the areas where community staff required connectivity and access. This was broken down into 2 areas:

• NHS locations (including GP surgeries, community locations and co-located NHS offices within special schools)
• non-NHS locations (including children's centres, council locations, schools, patient homes and staff homes)

At the time of taking on community services Mid Cheshire only had a small LAN which provided IT services for its staff across 3 sites. The LAN was provided via a direct fibre circuit. 

The requirement for community services was a connection at over 20 different sites, over a much wider geographical area.

For more detail on the location and type of sites, read the full report and appendices.

For the NHS locations, Mid Cheshire were aware that the local CSU did have a large scale MPLS network across all these NHS locations, however that network was not connected to the Mid Cheshire network.

When the CSU put in the MPLS network in 2010, the Primary Care Trust (PCT) at the time were responsible for funding all sites. Over the years as the PCT was disbanded in favour of Clinical Commissioning Groups the funding to maintain primary care sites was maintain but community services were moved to East Cheshire who didn’t provide the same level of investment at sites.

When Mid Cheshire took on the community services from East Cheshire a number of the community only locations needed investment in new switches, as in some cases the network equipment was over 7 years old.

In addition to the clinical settings, community staff also had the requirement to work flexibly across the region at non-NHS sites. This included connections from patient’s homes, council locations, and other ad-hoc locations.

The networking requirements at these locations was slightly different to the requirements for NHS locations, as the estates were out of our control so installing networking equipment, such as communications cabinets was not feasible or possible. The staff were completely reliant on mobile networking for connectivity at these sites.