West Midlands Ambulance Service Gets Life Critical Support with Numara Track-It!
Help Desk Solution Offers Reliability, Flexibility and Automation to Enable the Countryâ??s Emergency Services to Deliver itâ??s IM&T Support and Implementation Functions with Confidence
Reading, UK (April 30, 2009) –
Numara Software, Inc., a leader in help desk management solutions, announced today that the West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust (WMAS) has chosen to upgrade its help desk solution, Numara Track-It! to the latest version of the software.
Industrial strength IT processes are a prerequisite for the delivery of IT in the life-critical emergency services sector. The number of technology-led projects on the go, and the need to support thousands of users, any one of whose calls may be life-critical, means an increasing volume of IT demands and growing complexity for the help desk. At the same time, the size and breadth of emergency services is growing, particularly for ambulance services in England following a decision by the Department of Health to reduce their number from 31 services to 12, effectively creating ‘super-regional’ organisations.
In the case of West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust (WMAS), which is consistently the highest performing regional ambulance service in the country, and Ambulance Service of the Year in 2007, this industry restructuring led to an upgrade of its help desk management system to match the demands of a newly-merged organisation providing services across the West Midlands region, covering Hereford and Worcester, Coventry and Warwickshire, West Midlands, Shropshire and most recently, Staffordshire.
In all, WMAS covers a population of 5.3m people in an area of around 5,000 square miles, employing 3,500 staff across 63 sites. The operational employees, such as ambulance drivers, respond to over 450,000 emergency requests every year.
For WMAS, a key goal of using Numara Track-It! is to gain full control of its IT assets, both hardware and software, and be able to save time and money in managing those assets, as well as being able to proactively solve any problems. IT is critical to the daily ongoing delivery of the Ambulance Service to the general public and there are around 30 people in the IT department servicing between 1,000 to 1500 end-users at any given time.
The Ambulance Service’s operational staff needs exactly the same functions and support from its help desk and IT department as any ordinary business. However, unlike a normal business, the Trust must operate a number of flexible shift patterns in order to deliver a 24-hour service and that must be reflected in the support provided by the IT department.
Philip Smith, Project Manager for WMAS takes up the story:
“The typical queries that we get are mainly system fault calls on any IT-related equipment. As you can imagine, we can’t have any equipment that doesn’t work, because in our industry, downtime could cost lives. Additionally, we also get the regular requests for information, changes, upgrades, new starters, password resets, etc, just like any other business, and a wider variety of project-related work. We run a number of control centres which take the 999 calls. The calls made to IT from these control centres are of paramount importance. Lives could be at risk, so we cannot afford any downtime or faulty technology.”
One of the key functions of Numara Track-It! that WMAS plans to use is the asset tracking templates which enable Numara Track-It! to manage its extensive region-wide inventory of assets. The latest version also allows the IT team to run automated audits, so that effectively anything with an IP address can be discovered. Currently, WMAS has around 100 IT projects in progress at any one time, including the rollout of a new 999 control system. So for the IM&T staff, life is hectic.
“The original Numara Track-It! implementation went very smoothly and we’ve not experienced any problem since, so we have decided to upgrade to the latest version. Although we have yet to use the product to its full capacity – we are probably only using about 50 per cent of its functionality – I am looking forward to utilising the purchasing and library modules that come as standard with this version. The important thing from our perspective was to get the product upgraded and implemented so that we are ready to handle future requirements without any disruption to the organisation,” says Phil Smith.
Currently WMAS has a number of sites across the region that have their own help desk due to the merger of the different ambulance services, and a key goal for the IT department moving forward is now to amalgamate all of these into one central help desk using Numara Track-It!. Additionally WMAS is keen to develop the self service capability within Numara Track-It! and longer-term, it plans to have most of the queries coming through the self service portal rather than email. Philip Smith concludes:
“Numara Track-It! is an incredibly flexible, scalable and intuitive product which we have found very easy to learn and use. We very rarely have the need to call Numara Software for support or assistance. In fact since working at the Trust I think we have only ever queried a couple of things and this is because the product does exactly what we need it to.”
Numara Software already has a significant presence in the emergency services sector, providing a help desk environment through Numara Track-It! to numerous ambulance services, hospitals, police forces and fire and rescue organisations throughout the UK. Customers benefitting from Numara Track-It! include: East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust, West Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust, North West Ambulance Service NHS Trust, Northern Ireland Ambulance Service, Medway NHS Foundation Trust, South East Coast Ambulance Service, Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humber Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, East London and The City Mental Health NHS Trust, Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service, Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service, Bedfordshire and Luton Combined Fire Authority, Essex County Fire and Rescue Service and Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service. All of these sites are already maximising efficiencies and getting ahead of their help desk needs because they have installed Numara Track-It!
For more information on Numara Track-It!, please visit www.numarasoftware.co.uk.
Source: Numara