Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust provides healthcare services for the people of North Northamptonshire and South Leicestershire, and with over 4,000 employees is one of the largest employers in Northamptonshire.
Kettering General Hospital’s ambition to be the most digitally enabled hospital group in the United Kingdom by 2023 was accelerated when the pandemic created a greater need to free up as much hospital space as possible for clinical use. The NHS Foundation Trust wanted to enable its staff to make a positive impact using technology in a quick and secure manner.
A lot of the Trust’s digital strategy was already in place pre-pandemic, but by fast-tracking further planned advancements, Kettering General Hospital – part of a group with Northampton General Hospital – recognised that it could drive its goals and also support its front-line staff to do their jobs during a challenging time.
“I’ve been a qualified nurse for 26 years and my immediate emotional reaction was to go and put on my uniform and go and help on the front line. It really made me feel extremely guilty, but then when we started to deploy the technology, that just went away because the stuff that we were putting in, the applications, and the way that I was able to support staff in using them, far outweighed anything I could have done as an individual.”
Craig Taylor, Director of Cloud Solutions at Phoenix comments, “Coming from a place of legacy infrastructure, the Trust needed to completely modernise its data centre and unlock the power and ability that the cloud provides.”
Working with Kettering General Hospital, Phoenix is helping to completely transform the Trust’s IT estate with a focus on innovation, including migrating from on-premise to cloud, a data warehouse for its health intelligence team, and developing a new approach to virtual working using the Microsoft365 Suite and Surface devices.
As a key component in Kettering’s digital strategy, a move to the cloud has allowed the Trust to scale as it brings in new services and implements rapid solutions, and has opened up the possibility of digital inclusion and equality, which will allow the hospital to reach even more people who need its services.
Phoenix Managing Director, Samantha Mudd explains, “As Trusts move to the cloud, whether it’s in its entirety or as a hybrid strategy, they’ll be able to access functionality such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning as well as the Internet of Things. All of these new exciting areas are leading edge.”
Moving forward, Kettering General Hospital is looking at how it can make best use of the resources and technology it has, allowing its employees to free up more of their time to better support their patients. As Microsoft’s Partner of the Year 2021, working with Phoenix gives the Trust access to Microsoft’s Azure FastTrack team and training through the Enterprise Skills Initiative to enable speed, while ensuring this change is delivered in a secure and sustainable way.
Samantha Mudd concludes, “Knowing that the work we’re doing with Kettering General Hospital and many other NHS Trusts is having such a huge impact, is something that I take huge pride in. Because it’s that acknowledgment – the support that those patients are going to get has been enhanced through the technology advances that Microsoft, Phoenix and other complementary technologies are making in these hospitals and in these Trusts.”
To find out how Phoenix, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 can help your organisation with its digital transformation strategy, please contact Phoenix on 01904 562200 or email [email protected].
Phoenix enables digital transformation in the workplace, empowering UK organisations to innovate and transform with cloud and hybrid infrastructures data, AI, security, and collaboration tools. By understanding the individual goals of its customers, Phoenix delivers remarkable, outcome-focused IT solutions and services that allow UK organisations to make a difference to the lives of their employees, service users, and communities.
Phoenix is a signatory on the Race at Work Charter, and a Disability Confident and Living Wage employer. The company is also actively involved in encouraging more women into the IT industry.
