Worcestershire NHS Trusts outsource IT services to Computacenter

Five year deal is valued at between £12m and £18m and covers more than 9,000 NHS employees

NHS hospitals, health centres and GP surgeries in Worcestershire will receive IT support from services provider Computacenter, as part of a five-year deal.

According to the initial notice in the Official Journal of the European Union, the contract was valued at between £12m and £18m.

Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, Worcestershire Health & Care NHS Trust and Worcestershire's three Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) - Redditch and Bromsgrove CCG, South Worcestershire CCG and Wyre Forest CCG - will share the service.

The contract covers remote and desk-side support for more than 9,000 NHS employees across 160-plus sites, including eight hospitals and 66 GP surgeries.

As part of the five-year contract, there are a number of IT transformation initiatives being planned including better connectivity for GP surgeries within the county, and establishing unified communications for community and mental health workers.

James Longmore, ICT director for Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said that the new contract would enable the trust to "improve efficiency, patient safety and health outcomes by minimising ICT downtime and disruption for clinical and administrative staff".

Colin Innes, head of IT for Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust added: "Like any NHS organisation, we are being challenged to deliver more services with limited resources. By modernising our ICT services and systems, we will be able to deliver better outcomes by achieving greater efficiencies."

Computacenter will also be consolidating and virtualising the server and storage infrastructure for the Worcestershire organisations, and upgrading the data centre. It claimed that this is to "prevent clinical application outages".

The IT services firm aims to improve the reliability of core clinical systems and the availability of electronic patient records, and the organisations involved hope that the ICT framework will enable future technological initiatives to take shape, such as desktop virtualisation, mobility and secure data-sharing between NHS organisations.

Other parts of the contract include areas such as problem, patch, asset, capacity, security and build management.

The first phase of the service went live on 1 December 2014 and the service will continue to be rolled out across all three organisations throughout 2015.