Part of Mid Cheshire Hospitals Foundation Trust: community connectivity challenges report
The IT challenge
The challenges
With the forming of CCICP, there were some challenges from an IT Infrastructure and a connectivity perspective:
- As the staff were being moved from another trust, access to the Mid Cheshire IT systems and services were not available at the sites where community staff worked.
- Mid Cheshire had a small LAN (local area network) which just covered the main hospital sites, and didn’t connect to GP practices, community hubs, patient homes, care homes, and staff home locations where the staff required access.
- The existing equipment which came with the staff was old and not fit for purpose. The staff who worked in the community only had iPads with 3G connections, which allowed them to access limited information on their clinical system at the time. These iPads could not easily be used to access other systems and services, which the team required.
The impact
The impact to staff if these challenges were not addressed was:
- Staff would have to return to a Mid Cheshire location to complete documentation and updating of the Electronic Patient Record.
- Staff would spend clinical time logging IT issues instead of focusing on patient care.
- Mid Cheshire IT staff would not be able to remotely support staff, meaning staff would need to attend the main site for fault resolution.
- Staff would need to complete paper notes when IT networks or equipment was not in place. This would then need to be transcribed into the main system once returned to base. Paper could get lost and information governance risks would be increased.
- Co-located working with primary care colleagues would not be possible.
The questions
The main questions the Mid Cheshire technical team needed to review were:
- How do we provide a large-scale network for staff, with a consistent method of connection across different care settings?
- What are the right hardware and software solutions which allowed staff to work wherever they required?
East Cheshire Trust outsourced its IT support and infrastructure to Midlands and Lancashire CSU. They provided a MPLS network across all GP practices in Cheshire, as well as some community locations. The challenge for Mid Cheshire was that this MPLS network didn’t have a connection to any systems or services at Mid Cheshire. Mid Cheshire also didn’t hold a support contract with the CSU.
The main reason for Mid Cheshire not utilising the CSU’s infrastructure was predominantly cost. To provide network connections into all the required locations, where an existing network connection was already in place would have been expensive and time consuming to implement.
Last edited: 22 October 2024 3:50 pm