Case Studies
Digital, Cloud and Innovation
Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response SharePoint Site
Objective
N3i provides HNY ICB with a solution for sharing key documentation to support their Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response.
Overview
The NHS England Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response (EPRR) Framework, identifies that ICBs, and their NHS funded services, must show they can effectively respond to major, critical, and business continuity incidents whilst maintaining services to patients.
It was essential for the Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (HNY ICB) to ensure that all key documentation was available 24/7 to support on-call staff with their emergency response in the event of an incident.
It was also necessary to provide access to other core documentation including effective training and development guidance.
The Challenges
Whilst the existing network share was an adequate solution to store documents, there were risks of network disruption and difficulties with easily sharing with partner organisations. It wasn’t user friendly and search functionality was limited, which is especially important when information needs to be located quickly. It also wasn’t suitable as a single source of information for sharing media, links and training materials alongside the standard documents.
There was no funding available to purchase a bespoke solution so existing technology needed to be used. The adopted system needed to be simple to use to ensure staff engaged it immediately. A training manual needed to be created to allow the site to be administered by various members of the team and ensure resilience during staff absences.
As always N3i have been incredibly supportive especially in the early days of the site and learning how the different parts work. The team have always been very responsive to any queries we had
The Solution
N3i identified SharePoint as the best solution and provided advice and guidance to enable the EPRR team to build the site. This provided a framework where documents, links and information could be uploaded in a user-friendly way and be easily accessed from laptops and mobile devices when staff are off site.
Information could also be shared easily with external colleagues who are supported by different IT providers.
N3i provided SharePoint training for users and administrators of the system to ensure they were comfortable in using it to get the information they needed.
Impact
Staff found the system very intuitive and easy to use and it has now evolved into a tool which is shared beyond the ICB On Call team. The capability of the site means that specific sections of it can be shared with colleagues in other organisations to share vital live information during incident management.
A further advantage is the ICB use the site to share information with partners for learning and development opportunities which prevents duplication of work across multiple organisations.
The SharePoint site has evolved over the last year into something much larger than originally planned and the ICB are keen to review it in the coming months to streamline it and make it more efficient and utilise more capability.
