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Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust (PCFT)

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Serving more than 4200 staff across five boroughs, Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust deliver mental health, learning disability, autism and drug and alcohol services in Greater Manchester.

The trust’s fixed connectivity plan aimed to consolidate 60 sites to the most resource intensive 37 sites and focus infrastructure improvements to offer a broader range of services. 

Gigabit Pathway upgrade: 37 sites are supported to upgrade to Gigabit connectivity, enabling:

  • deployment of cloud services
  • enhanced speed of service and connectivity reliability 

Pennine care map

Challenge

The existing network infrastructure across the Trust cannot match the service demand which results in frequent outages and general performance issues.

The existing VPN could not be scaled to handle hybrid working and meet the new demand. This, combined with an aging infrastructure network led to a requirement for circuit upgrades to improve bandwidth.

It was also identified that there was significant site bandwidth impact due to extended (daisy-chained) networks and buildings at larger sites.

Solution

As a result of the support from the Future Connectivity Gigabit Pathways, all of the 37 consolidated sites have now been upgraded to gigabit capable circuits. Sites with larger demand benefit from high bandwidth connectivity which offers up to 5Gbps connectivity.

This has resulted in significant upgrades in circuit speeds across all sites, with consolidated or shared connections reducing the need for additional circuits.

The Zero Trust Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution has improved connection between users and applications by combining cloud based network tooling and security as a service.

Benefits

The network upgrades facilitate migration of all windows-based servers to Microsoft Azure, promoting a smooth transition to cloud-based services such as O365, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online.

The trust is benefiting from enhanced connectivity reliability and speed of service, this is mainly delivered through improved coverage and access to Digital services at point of care.

Long term strategic digital transformation objectives, such as Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration (ePMA), can now be considered due to the improved connectivity.

Last edited: 2 August 2024 4:28 pm