Making the most of NHS IT teams

In discussing the relentless pressure that has been faced by NHS staff in recent years, IT staff are sometimes forgotten – yet they too have encountered novel challenges. When the pandemic first hit, they were charged with scaling up the usage of Teams and other remote working options more or less overnight. New expectations on remote consultations further increased pressures, as did the need for data to understand local pressures, and all of this alongside existing long-term plans for increased healthcare digitisation. Huge projects like the implementation of electronic patient records remain firmly on the agenda.

So how can the pressures on NHS IT teams best be mitigated? Where does it make most sense to focus this key resource? How do the challenges of day to day IT operations – helping with lost passwords, supporting the user who can’t get into their email, dealing with hardware problems – need to sit alongside planning for broader strategic change? In short, how can organisations make the most of their IT teams?

This HSJ webinar, run in association with ServiceNow, brought together a small panel to consider such issues.