OUTSOURCING
One of the country’s largest mental health trusts has become the fi rst to use the Desktop 21 framework, to outsource its IT provision to HP Enterprise Services. Trust medical director Dr Pete Sudbury spoke to NHE about the decision.
he NHS seems to be entering a new era, without PCTs there to lead on shared services agreements and IT contracts.
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Some other NHS organisations are treating the new environment as an opportunity to run services in a new way.
Among them is the Barnet, Enfi eld & Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust, which serves 800,000 people across north Lon- don, and which has chosen to use Buying Solutions’ Desktop 21 framework to sign a deal with HP – one of the three IT compa- nies that make up Desktop 21, along with Fujitsu and Atos Origin.
The fi ve-to-seven year contract – the value of which neither party will disclose – in- cludes application hosting, network man- agement, data centre services and remote support services.
The right answer
Trust medical director Dr Pete Sudbury, who was the clinical lead on the project, spoke to NHE a few weeks after the con- tract came into effect in June. He said the biggest concern for him was the practical impact for trust staff and the ease of com- municating with HP.
He told us: “It certainly seems to be going all right so far. The main thing I’ve noticed is that I phoned the helpdesk at 7.30am and someone answered, and was able to give me an intelligent answer; they answered in a few rings, not in several minutes. So, those little things in terms of service quality show that already there has been a step change.”
Does it bother him that there will not be staff based on site to raise issues with in person?
He said: “I don’t really care where people are based! I don’t care where they are, as long as they can get in contact with me. I don’t care if they’re in China.
“I think what’s much more important is the relationship at a personal level with the top people involved in this. That’s very good; we’ve built a very good relationship with our senior contacts at HP.
“To some extent, that was what I was look- 50 | national health executive Jul/Aug 11
ing for when we went round looking at the three companies; what did it feel like speaking with them? What would it feel like working with them?”
Above and beyond
“If you’re looking for an expert IT provider, you’re looking for someone who isn’t just going to stick to the letter of the contract,” Dr Sudbury continued. “I’m an NPfIT ‘sur- vivor’ and I’ve seen what happens when you have a stupid contract that dominates everything.
“You need your IT provider to be saying ‘no, I wouldn’t do that if I were you, be- cause two years down the line this is going to come in which completely changes the game’. So what would have been great is if someone could have told us two years ago, or a year ago, about cloud computing and how that might infl uence whether we got certain servers or not.
“It’s vital that they’re more than just some- body who works to a contract with you. We needed someone whose job is to scan the horizon and tell us what’s coming up in the fi eld in which they are experts. That’s what I wanted to know they would do. I think – and hope – that they will do that.”
Ready made
As the fi rst NHS trust to use the Desktop 21 framework, would he recommend it to other trusts?
He is unequivocal: “Oh Lord yes. It’s an aw- ful lot easier when someone else has done a lot of the background work and you have only three suppliers to look at. You don’t have to go through the unadulterated pain of an OJEU process. I think it’s a great idea, I really do.”
In an NHS without PCTs – or at least, not as they exist now – more trusts are going
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