NHS North East London Commissioning Support Unit

NHS North East London Commissioning Support Unit (NEL CSU) provides a wide range of services to its customers including infrastructure and network design planning and support and field service support. NEL CSU works with GPs, clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), integrated care systems (ICSs) and the police and health and justice sectors.

The CSU provides IT services to GP practices (which represents 80-90% of their business) and CCGs across Suffolk, Kent, Sussex, Northamptonshire and the majority of London. This is in the region of a fifth to a quarter of all of England’s GP practices.

The Suffolk HSCN migrations went very smoothly with the CSU appreciating MLL contacting the GP practices, as well as the CCG, to make arrangements. In Northamptonshire, there was a need to understand the amount of notice required by the GP practices before building access arrangements could be made. After the technical migration plans were revised, the number of issues encountered reduced and the migrations gathered momentum.

MLL and BT, as the CNSP’s in Suffolk and Northamptonshire respectively, worked very closely with the CCGs and CSU. Positive working relationships were formed quite quickly with the parties meeting regularly and understanding the different ways of working. This collaborative working and effective communication enabled issues to be worked through effectively, resulting in the projects running smoothly.

The team managed to minimise the downtime to five minutes for most of the migrations which reduced the impact on the delivery of care by healthcare professionals at the GP practices.

Migrating to HSCN has resulted in very significant cost savings and capacity gains. In Northamptonshire, which covers 800,000 patients at 90 GP practices across two CCGs, cost savings of 60% are being realised year to year. In Suffolk, significant cost savings are also expected to be achieved.

HSCN has brought much faster connections compared with the legacy service. At 95% of sites (in the regions detailed above), healthcare professionals are now benefiting from reduced latency via the 100MB fibre circuits. In addition, HSCN has enabled the technology strategy in the migration of all practices’ data services to the cloud.

HSCN is a link to the ‘outside world’ for GP practices and links to the core clinical systems, enabling access to patient notes, appointments, links to pathology labs and referrals to outpatients or other NHS services. It is critical that this HSCN connectivity is available as all the services are web-based and cloud-hosted.

After re-evaluating dual circuits, an approach (underpinned by HSCN) was taken to reduce service level agreement times on the primary link. This approach is more cost effective, fit for purpose and ensures that the primary link is reinstated sooner, thereby minimising the clinical risk from network disruptions.

HSCN, and larger, more resilient connections, have enabled the Microsoft Azure project in Suffolk. In time, this will boost the reliability of services and provide cost saving benefits.

Northamptonshire are actively researching video consultations in the form of web-based patient consultations with GPs, a project which would not have been possible without the platform and increased bandwidth of HSCN.