The Sussex Health Informatics Service (HIS) provides IT and associated services to NHS member organisations across the county.

It is the largest HIS in the UK, with 400 staff and 25,000 users across 17 sites. As part of the NHS, the Sussex HIS is required to use recognised frameworks to ensure good practice is offered and measured under the National Programme for IT.

Having recently consolidated a large number of smaller IT departments into a more centralised organisation, the Sussex HIS has devised a programme to provide all 400 technology staff with IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) awareness. As many as 89 of those employees will go on to achieve a foundation ITIL qualification.

“We were not previously IT service management-oriented because there were 17 small IT departments, so we have taken the ITIL standard and we are joining it up across those technology departments as we speak,” said Wendy Dearing, senior lead for training, change and process continuity, and head of education training development for Sussex HIS.

“The idea is to make sure everybody has ITIL awareness. Line managers and those who need it will go on the ITIL foundation course, and appropriate staff groups will do whichever specialist courses are related to their job function. We also have a dedicated ITIL manager in situ, who will help us to comply with the ISO 20000 standard.”

The Sussex HIS is using the Prince2 and Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) project management methodologies. Crucial to such initiatives is internal e-learning and assistance from specialist training firms.

The organisation is also required to make sure employees adhere to the NHS’s self-assessment and skills competency frameworks. Dearing says it is a challenge to co-ordinate training and to revamp job descriptions.

“Making sure all staff have formalised appraisals and personal development plans across the board is hard work, and it is always a challenge to release staff for IT service management training,” she says.

“But we are trying to do more blended learning that does not require attendance at a formal course, but where staff just have to get up to speed for exams. We are also looking at apprenticeships, national vocational qualifications and cadetships to make sure that staff have relevant IT service management knowledge from the start.”