NHS Wales has signed a new deal with Microsoft that will provide over 100,000 NHS Wales staff access to Office 365.
GPs, consultants, nurses, therapists, paramedics and support staff will all be able to utilise Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, Office, Yammer, OneNote and SharePoint as part of the deal.
Andrew Griffiths, Director, NHS Wales Informatics Service said “This new national agreement is part of our commitment to refresh NHS Wales IT infrastructure and ensure it supports the transformational changes taking place across health and social care. It moves our digital estate away from locally managed services and into cloud-based services, delivering efficiencies and economies of scale.”
“Frontline staff who work in our health and care services rely on technology, to help them deliver services in new, innovative ways that put the needs of patients first. So I am very pleased that we are able to deliver the most up to date tools to our NHS Wales staff to help them with the fantastic work they do every day.”
Office 365 supports mobile working across multiple devices, such as phones, tablets and laptops, opening up opportunities for collaboration without the need to travel and the potential for new approaches to triage and consultations through integrated media and video conferencing.
The deal also includes an upgrade to Windows 10 E5, Microsoft’s operating system with the latest security features, such as Advanced Threat Protection, that guard against the ever-changing panorama of cyber threats.
Andrew Griffiths commented “It’s essential that NHS Wales has secure systems that health staff and patients trust and this agreement will help achieve that. It will increase resilience and mean our services are running on the most up to date operating system at all times.”
The £39 million agreement with Microsoft runs for three years. NHS Wales’ previous enterprise agreement with Microsoft ends on 30 June 2019. Roll out of the new Office 365 service begins on 1 July, 2019.
