Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

About the customer

The Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust is a specialist NHS organisation providing mental health and learning disability services. More than 5,000 employees provide outstanding care to children, young people, adults of working age, and older people living in southeast England. The Trust provides care in a range of locations, including people’s own homes, specialist clinics, hospitals, low and medium secure units, and GP surgeries. As a member of the University Hospital Association, it is recognised for its strengths in research and education. It is also part of the Sussex Health and Care Partnership, working together with other organisations to continually improve services for the local communities that surround it.

The challenge

To meet the ongoing sector targets for increased operational efficiency, balanced with cost savings, the Trust was looking to operate in a more agile way. They wanted to be able to increase and decrease (flex) their compute resources and associated charges to meet organisational needs. Beyond these infrastructure needs, the Trust also aimed to transform how it communicates with both staff and patients.

This required a transformation from an existing legacy dedicated compute environment into a cloud service, involving a full migration to a new domain utilising the EA Microsoft licenses they had procured previously. Most of the estate also required operating system upgrades as part of the transformation activity. The Trust needed a solution that enabled this transformation, provide the flexibility to scale to meet future demands for servers (virtual machines) and storage demands, ensure high availability within the core solution, and stay within budget.

The solution

To address these challenges, the Trust partnered with us, and harnessed their Customer Design Authority (CDA) for critical expertise: 

• CDA provided technical leadership, consultancy, mediation, and approvals.
• Goals were defined, potential risks identified, and a technology roadmap created.
• Complex workshops led to reviewing over 300 servers for re-hosting, rebuilding, re-architecting, or decommissioning, with resilience requirements assessed.
• Explored and validated public (Microsoft Azure), community (Flex), and private cloud options; opted for community cloud via our Flex 2 solution.
• Community cloud migration of the core compute infrastructure of servers (AKA its 'crown jewels') balanced licensing, scalability, availability, and budget needs, with a 50/50 split to mitigate catastrophe risks. In the unlikely event of catastrophic failure, only 50% of the Trust’s critical data would need to be transferred to and run from an alternate location.
• An interim transitional platform supported the decommissioning in the initial 9 months, reducing potential outages. 
• Transformed and upgraded the Trust's unified communications onto the Flex 2 platform, and mobile services were also renewed.

The results

With our expert support and the strategic guidance of the CDA, the Trust achieved its goals of agility, flexibility, scalability and resilience:

• Security was maintained, using existing licensing and managing commercial goals effectively, avoiding pure-play consumption service risks.
• CDA's guidance ensuring solutions aligned with the Trust's broader business objectives. 
• The community cloud's flexibility allowed resource scaling, ensuring high availability and increased resilience.
• Communication with staff and patients improved by modernising the unified communications platform. 
• CDA's contributions facilitated capacity planning and technology roadmapping, ensuring future needs are anticipated. 
• Monthly discussions improved spend forecasts, system upgrade planning, and identified cost-effective advancements. 

This transformation has set the stage for future innovations, including the planned shift from traditional PSTN lines to internet-based communication solutions ahead of the 2027 switch-off. 

"Through the transformational activity, Wavenet has proven themselves to be a strong and determined partner helping the Trust achieve its objectives."

Tina Giles

Director of Technology at Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

*The initial engagement was with Daisy, acquired by Wavenet in 2024.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could help your business with the areas covered in this case study, then get in touch at enquiries@wavenet.co.uk.