Merging 2 Hospital Trusts, Consolidating Architecture, & Adopting Cloud
“It’s great working with an SME that can take the time to understand the NHS and can take the time to understand the locality. They took time to understand us and tune their output to what we needed. With bigger companies you find a one size fits all model. It really wasn’t that - it was about the service that we needed.”
Rachel Dunscombe, Director of Digital Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust & CEO NHS Digital Academy
The Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust, established on October 1, 2021, is a major healthcare provider in Greater Manchester, England. It resulted from the merger of Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust and The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, serving over a million people with a wide range of health and social care services through four main hospitals and numerous community facilities.
Mapped full IT services across 2 NHS Hospital Trusts
Crafted strategy & target architectures to meet organisation’s objectives
Created an actionable roadmap for Trust’s merger & cloud adoption
The Problem
Salford Royal Hospital NHS Trust wanted to benefit from modern cloud services whilst they were also taking responsibility for Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust in preparation for their eventual merger to become the Northern Care Alliance. They also wanted an accurate view of what IT services, apps and infrastructure existed across both organisations to inform a strategy and plan for modernisation and merger.
“Working with Shaping Cloud was an englightening experience. They brought new ideas, they’re good listeners; they gave good quality feedback and were very keen to talk to the right types of people in the organisation - not just the technicians.”
The Solution
Shaping Cloud undertook a discovery of both Acute Hospital Trust IT Services, applications and infrastructure - presenting back a detailed architecture set within the context of culture, digital maturity, and service performance. This was then used to inform the development of a strategy that enabled the organisation’s wider goals whilst consolidating services and architecture, and highlighting opportunities to modernise and improve user experience. Shaping Cloud presented this strategy and supporting architecture along with a costed business case and roadmap for implementation.
“Shaping Cloud had a lot of knowledge, but they were willing to learn about how they could best help us. They understood that the decision to go to cloud isn’t just about technology, but also about wider aspects of the business.”
The Outcome
The Trust was able to adopt the resultant strategy, and start to implement the proposed plans to bring together architecture and services across both hospital Trusts. With Shaping Cloud’s subsequent help, it was also able to set up an Azure tenancy and migrate key clinical workloads to alleviate on-premise capacity and performance challenges as well as prove performance, security, and cost improvements as a result of adopting cloud services.
