IT help desk services

West London Mental Health Trust optimises IT help desk support

Summary

West London Mental Health Trust (WLMHT) provides a full range of local mental health services for children, adults and older people living in the boroughs of Ealing, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Hounslow. It also provides high security services at Broadmoor Hospital.

With IT support required to cater for 2,500 members of staff across 30 sites, help desk optimisation was essential in order to deliver the best service possible. Touchpaper IT Business Management (ITBM) software has enabled the trust to customise processes around the requirements of staff rather than the other way around

The ability to monitor and analyse work performed by the support team has reduced human error while increasing the quality of service received by users.

WLMHT are continuing to develop the ITBM suite to deal with service desk needs as they evolve. Plans are in action to expand the Touchpaper system into other functional and geographical support areas.

The issue

WLMHT provides a full range of local, specialist and forensic mental health services, as well as high-security services at Broadmoor Hospital.

The Trust's service desk and support functions needed to be optimised in order to help staff to better resolve user incidents and queries, working in accordance with the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best-practice principles; a requirement determined both locally and in order for the Trust to meet the standards set for accreditation by NHS Connecting for Health (NHS CfH).

With over 2,500 members of staff across 30 sites and with all users heavily reliant upon the IT infrastructure to access critical information — from patient records to medical research — it was imperative that the trust had a robust and agile ITIL-based service desk in place to deal with any incoming queries. With ITIL v3 still hot on the heels of many organisations, the role of the service desk is becoming even more critical — particularly within the health and medical services industry.

The solution

WLMHT reviewed the market to make sure that the solution it deployed was both highly functional and cost-effective. The Trust needed a new system that would help it to become more ITIL-compatible, and also needed to upgrade the existing system to take a more holistic approach to customer service.

After evaluating the options, WLMHT selected the Touchpaper ITBM Suite based on its ability to deliver all of the functionality that the trust needed, including the ability to integrate easily with existing systems, to facilitate the delivery of automated business processes, and to provide value for money.

The Touchpaper ITBM suite provides the ability to build and customise processes around the way that WLMHT staff work. The indepth analysis of work performed in support allows human error to be significantly reduced while the quality of information provided to users is increased.

Benefits

The feature-rich functionality of the ITBM Suite, has provided WLMHT with the ability to build and customise its own processes centred around the way in which it works. Specifically the provision of ITIL-compliant but flexible and pragmatic incident, problem and change processes is both important for Trust efficiency and for compliance with national projects.

Integration with external services such as Novell directory, and the web-based (partially user defined) source of user information makes logged information more accurate, and thus responses more efficient.

The ITBM suite lends itself readily to performing indepth analysis of work performed in support. This has specifically helped to reduce human error and increase the quality of information provided to users.

Next steps

WLMHT has plans to further develop the ITBM Suite as its service desk needs continue to evolve. It is now looking to expand the Touchpaper solution into other functional and geographical support areas.