CASE STUDIES DURHAM AND DARLINGTON NHS TRUST

North East NHS Trust relies on Nviron expertise

Background

County Durham and Darlington Priority Services is an NHS Trust that provides a range of services and facilities for people with mental health problems or learning disabilities in County Durham and Darlington.

The Trust delivers these services to 500,000 people who live in a variety of urban and rural settings. The area covers more than 900 square miles and ranges from the scattered farming communities of Teesdale, to the larger towns such as Darlington and Durham. It includes areas of light industry, tourist attractions and a university population.

The Trust headquarters are at Earls House on the outskirts of Durham City. The Trust provides its services at several major sites, with two main in-patient and out-patient centres. In total there are 53 premises owned by the Trust, with a value of approximately £16 million and a further 25 properties from which Trust staff work.

Problem

Over the years the Trust has developed a complex IT infrastructure to support its widely distributed staff. This consists primarily of technologies from Novell, Citrix and Microsoft.

Such a diverse infrastructure requires a great deal of knowledge to support and maintain, and while the Trust had developed a strong pool of internal skills, they still needed to work with an external partner to ensure that the systems were fully supported and kept operational.

Although the Trust had partnered with an external company for a number of years, concerns about their ability to support the Citrix-based systems and the need to expand the infrastructure to include other technologies in the future led the Trust to search for a new partner for their support requirements.

Solution

After reviewing the options available to them the Trust decided to partner with Nviron, who provided their SystemCare managed support solution. SystemCare is designed specifically for organisations that require a fast and expert response to their IT problems.

Nviron’s team of professional support technicians have the necessary qualifications coupled with real-world experience of applying and supporting the technology the trust is dependent on. This ensures that they are able to help provide a fast diagnostic response to get systems up and running in the quickest possible time.

The service provides for:

• Unlimited number of telephone incidents each with a nominal 30 minute limit
• Quarterly site visits to carry out real and preventive maintenance
• Unlimited priority response with 7x24 Crisis Helpline option for on-site calls for system-dead
• Named Account Manager for advocacy
• Dial-in option for remote support and faster problem resolution
• SystemCare monitoring and reporting tool kit

Keith Ianson from Durham and Darlington Priority Services NHS Trust commented:

“The thing that has impressed us most about the SystemCare managed support solution is the proactive support provided by Nviron’s staff. They do not wait for us to contact them when things go wrong, but are constantly monitoring and assessing the state of our systems. This has meant that on a number of occasions we have been able to fix problems before they became issues that have affected our end users.

We will shortly be looking at migrating our infrastructure to a Microsoft Windows environment and we will be looking to Nviron to help us in the task.”