NHS Tayside cuts IT support costs and medical staff downtime

The National Health Service (NHS) Tayside Trust is reducing IT support complexity and user downtime with new remote IT service management tools, allowing the staff to devote more time to patient care.

Following a re-organisation in 2005, the Trust's IT department was tasked with managing all desktop services across its 7,000-strong PC estate. But it found the need to travel between the 100-plus sites within its remit was taking up too much of its time.

"We were also finding it difficult to manage and prioritise the flood of calls coming into the helpdesk from users with IT problems," said Paul Tovey, head of IT service delivery at NHS Tayside. "In addition, builds were not consistent across the different areas."

He said the department needed to better track the Trust's IT assets and standardise its desktop environment to improve its operating system (OS) security patching regime and enable remote patching and maintenance capabilities.

NHS Tayside has since deployed 5,419 licences of the Altiris Client Management Suite (level 1) from Symantec to cover the entire PC estate. "The implementation of Altiris Client Management Suite has greatly reduced the amount of time our IT team needs to spend on the road," he said.

The IT team can now remotely fix the majority of users' problems without leaving their desks, reducing user downtime. And the team also use the toolset to identify which PCs need patching, prioritising the patch by severity of vulnerability. They can then automatically deploy the patches, eliminating the need to physically visit each PC.

Tovey said: "The tool has accelerated our security process by reducing the need for extended patch test cycles." And the toolset is also being used to remotely power down PCs when they are not in use, contributing to a reduction in the organisation's electricity bills.

NHS Tayside has also just purchased the Altiris Asset Management Suite to manage its IT assets. The team intend to use this tool to record hardware and software assets, services, contacts and contracts in one place.

The total investment is also helping the IT team to plan future migration projects:

"Because we have a comprehensive overview of our PCs we are able to calculate which ones are suitable for upgrades," he said. "We can also estimate the potential costs to the organisation of upgrading OS or versions of software."

Tovey said, for example, the Trust will use the asset management tool to estimate how much a possible project to migrate to Windows Vista will cost, allowing him to build migration costs into the IT budget.

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