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Sharing the benefits

There is nothing new about the idea of shared services and in tough economic times it is prudent for organisations to streamline their services as much as possible. However, the North Mersey Health Informatics Service has become more than the sum of its parts, reports Richard Mackillican

The service was set up in October 2006 and originates from an agreement between all of the chief executives from across the Merseyside health economy to have a shared IT service to increase efficiency in the days before the word made front page news.

“There was quite a lengthy business case developed and obviously there were some elements of the service which were in and out of scope, but what we have developed is a service which fits a number of options in each of the Trusts which we support,” says Paul Turner, head of business management at the North Mersey Health Informatics Service.

“Some of these are purely technology driven services, some with both technology and programme management, along with others who have information services as well.”

One of the elements of the service is a service desk which handles around twelve and half thousand calls a month about desk top services and application support.

There is also a team of desk top engineers and a technical services team who deal with server management and technical issues.

There is also a voice and data unit which deals with telephones together with both the wide and local area networks at the organisations which the service supports.

The staff are inherited from the trusts which made up the shared service and now numbers around 280.

“We have definitely seen an increase in demand, especially around service desk calls and what we deem service delivery (technical support), which we have seen increase by around 25 per cent per annum since the service was set up with no real increase in budget.”

This means that the service is delivering efficiencies by default. With no real increase in budget, inflation is eroding the value of that budget year by year.

“I think that IT and informatics has gone from being what was essentially a cottage industry in the NHS five or six years ago, to being business critical now,” says Paul. “I think that this is linked to the increase in work and profile which we have undergone at the moment.”

The North Mersey Health Informatics Service has also had some involvement with trusts taking part in the National Programme for IT which have needed support.

“Where trusts are implementing national solutions, we have been party to that in both a project management context, along with technical enablement. Obviously, this changes from trust to trust.

“For example, we have had a large district hospital which has taken up a solution whereas others have stayed with their original suppliers because of delays in the programme.

“I think that NPfIT, in theory, could be incredibly beneficial to the health service, but due to the delays I think there is now an appetite to see if things should be realigned to look more at local solutions rather than a national one.”

There are seven partner organisations which range from specialist units to large district generals, PCTs and a mental health trust. What was the hardest part of setting it up?

“Particularly in the health service, a lot of these arrangement rely on goodwill in that we are not an entity which stands on our own. After all, we are hosted.

“In our model of a shared service, we are almost a quasi-cooperative and this has its advantages and its weaknesses. The advantages are that our direction is set by our partner organisations. However, this can also lead to disadvantages with regards to how you govern a shared service.”

Looking to the future, the service is looking to incorporate some of the trusts which missed out on joining the first time around.

“I think that there are other trusts which we have started to infiltrate now which didn’t come into the shared service. I think that there is also an awful lot which we can add to the local health community in terms of enabling technology to drive down costs.

“For example, we are looking at setting up a community data centre which would be a collaboration within the local health economy to rationalise all of their current infrastructure which we would manage on their behalf. However, I think that a lot of infrastructure which is there at the moment would not be suitable to be carried forward, so would need replacing.

“I think that we are in a process where we are able to offer market services which we haven’t done before, certainly in the case of bespoke services to partner organisations, such as web development, software, project and programme management.

“Project and programme management services have been almost a boom service for us with demand at least doubling within the last three years and continuing to grow as we have expertise and skilled project and programme managers are quite a finite resource in the health service. Hopefully we can expand this particular service into non-technical areas over the next couple of years.”

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