Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is the organisation which manages Leighton Hospital, Crewe; the Victoria Infirmary, Northwich and Elmhurst Intermediate care Centre, Winsford.
The Trust was originally established as an NHS trust in April 1991 and became a Foundation Trust in April 2008.
Mid Cheshire Hospitals has a vision to ‘deliver excellence in healthcare through innovations and collaboration,’ and is committed to offering safe, high-quality, cost-effective and sustainable services for patients and staff.
Like many NHS bodies, the Trust recognised that IT is an enabler in healthcare, and saw the growing importance of dependable network services such as email and other applications that would help maintain daily operations. However, they knew that in order to achieve their objectives they would need to evaluate their current IT infrastructure, which was lacking in several key areas.
They had a diverse estate with multiple point solutions, aging SAN that was at capacity and no scalability for future growth. They also had an inadequate Disaster Recovery plan that was no longer fit for purpose, and instead sought a solution with the ability to replicate data to a second, on-site server room, which would then be used to provide backups of the Trust’s data with no impact on service.
Matt Knobbs, ICT Support Manager at MCHT said, “We wanted a flexible platform that could expand in line with organisational growth over the next 5 to 10 years.” To achieve their objectives, the hospital looked to work with a vendor who could design and deliver new infrastructure that could increase storage, provide adequate disaster recovery and improve overall IT capabilities.
We wanted a flexible platform that could expand in line with organisational growth over the next 5 to 10 years. Matt Knobbs, ICT Support Manager, MCHT
With the FlexPod solution now fully implemented, Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust IM&T department and ANS are working together to support the clinical workforce by introducing technologies such as VDI and IPT and provide high-value, sustainable and IT-enabled services.
