Belfast Trust
Belfast Health & Social Care Trust (BHSCT) is one of the largest in the UK and has had a long standing relationship with Novosco for the delivery of innovative, cost effective and strategic ICT solutions.
Projects include a centralised email solution, server virtualisation, faster access to applications and a centralised storage solution.
BHSCT was created on April 1st 2007 as part of the Review of Public Administration (RPA) throughout Northern Ireland. The resultant organisation is the amalgamation of seven legacy organisations: Belfast City Hospital, Royal Group of Hospitals, South & East Belfast Trust, North & West Belfast Health & Social Services Trust, The Mater Hospital Trust, Belfast Link Labs and The Royal Medical Physics Agency. The Trust currently employs over 20,000 staff, treating in excess of 340,000 patients annually in over 120 sites in the Belfast metropolitan area.
The merger of the legacy trusts created unique IT problems for BHSCT. With an internal IT team of 80 staff managing over 300 applications and 14,000 IT end users, Novosco has created a centralised platform to assist the Trust with service desk projects and a service delivery issues.
Centralised email system
Novosco migrated all of the legacy trusts email accounts into a single ‘Belfast Trust Microsoft Exchange’ email system. This allowed users the benefit of shared calendaring between trusts and fast / central archiving of emails. “With one single Belfast Trust domain, users could share documents as if one organisation. This reduced internal IT support costs.” Paul Duffy, Co-Director for ICT & Telecommunications, BHSCT
Faster access to IT systems
With 127 buildings spread out across the Belfast area, Belfast Trust healthcare professionals traditionally experienced different speeds of application delivery. To ensure salient patient information was received in a timely fashion, Novosco implemented Citrix technology to enhance and consolidate access to applications, regardless of location.
Server Virtualisation
Novosco has virtualised over 550 traditional and local servers at the Belfast Trust. “We could not continue to support servers in a traditional sense where Legacy trusts were working as single entities. To reduce servers to a manageable level, as well as provide higher levels of user availability to applications, Novosco implemented virtualisation techniques on our servers”.
Using VMware virtualisation technology, Novosco migrated server data into a consolidated /virtual platform. This reduced server sprawl and lowered the maintenance / running costs of dedicated hardware. The project also streamlined the management of legacy servers in terms of patching and disaster recovery.
Centralised Storage
Belfast Trust did not have a cohesive storage strategy, which meant legacy server files could not be joined together. To solve this problem, Novosco designed and built a centralised storage solution using EMC Symmetrix DMX4 array. This resulted in faster /central data access for IT users and a reduction in ICT management overheads.
Novosco Managed Service Contract
On an ongoing basis, Novosco assists the BHSCT IT team in the delivery of strategic projects and support issues. Novosco and BHSCT have collectively delivered a number of highly strategic projects to resolve the initial problems posed by the creation of the new organisation. Novosco as a partner will help Belfast Trust to design its ICT infrastructure and integration strategy for the next three years.