NHS NATIONAL SERVICES SCOTLAND
screening programmes to the provision of services for GPs , to national platforms like the Community Health Index ( CHI ) platform – a unique ten-digit number used to identify patients across Scotland .
COVID-19 has provided an opportunity to accelerate the digitising of more services , and has quickly enabled patients – particularly those in remote communities – with more ways to digitally interact with healthcare services . This even includes the ability to have virtual consultations with doctors . " It really did push us down some paths much quicker than perhaps would have happened through a traditional programme of change ," Flockhart says .
" I think some of these services will still exist going forward and will evolve to serve more than one purpose in the future . If we look at things like vaccinations , there ' s no reason why we can ' t run that vaccination service in a similar way to our flu vaccines which creates an opportunity to provide a more consistent and simplified approach on a ‘ once for Scotland ’ basis , for example ."
Supporting the workforce When the pandemic began , Flockhart ' s team assessed the capabilities staff would need to do their jobs from home . A small percentage had laptops and mobiles and were already using Teams , albeit in a limited way . " The first thing we did was make sure all of our staff could connect to the services they needed . We had to take a very close look at how much traffic we could have on our network and how many people could log on to the VPN at any one point ."
" We had to substantially increase our bandwidth , issue a huge number of VPN tokens , and a huge number of devices had to go out the door to staff to make sure people had the equipment they required ."
“ We have all had a strong in this together momentum , moving in the same direction at the same time ”
STEVEN FLOCKHART DIRECTOR OF CLOUD ENGINEERING & OPERATIONS , NHS NATIONAL SERVICES SCOTLAND
Office 365 and Teams were rolled out within two weeks , which staff embraced . " I would say this was probably the single biggest success we had in terms of enabling our workforce to be able to operate outside of the office environment ," Flockhart says . " Yes , it comes with teething problems like anything else . But the ability it ' s given us to interact with each other in a connected , common , and consistent way has made a huge difference to people working from home . It ' s certainly one of the areas where we ' ve had the most feedback and where people have found it the most helpful ."
Remote working put a strain on their helpdesk as people needed assistance with their equipment . " We saw call volumes go through the roof more or less overnight ," Flockhart says . " I think that ' s a cultural thing – people think something is broken much quicker at home than when they ' re in an office environment , where the person next to them might usually be a quick point of help ."
Moving into the cloud The team provided the core infrastructure required to create online portals for vaccine bookings , which also allowed people to
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