NHS Health Scotland is Scotland's Health Improvement Agency, with approximately
250 employees and geographical coverage of the whole of Scotland.
The Learning and Workforce Development Team (L&WD) within NHS Health Scotland
provides training, trainer development, learning support, course design, development,
training needs analysis and evaluation for delivery to, and with, external partners
in the wider workforce.
Existing disparate systems did not allow L&WD and others to make decisions or
plans based on systematic analysis of data regarding what has been delivered across
all work streams which support health improvement policy.
To address these issues, NHS Health Scotland issued a mini-tender under the Framework
Agreement for the Provision of Software Support and Development Services with NHS
Scotland to design and develop an information tracking and reporting system, to
minimise duplication of data across several systems and to streamline business processes.
Objectives
NHS Health Scotland had developed a number of systems over the years to support
training course monitoring and tracking of participants and their feedback. The
existing systems were developed on a course by course basis as the suite of training
programmes grew. A need was identified for a single tool to store data and provide reports.
The system was required to meet the following key objectives.
- Provide a single central model of data across all sectors and work streams
- Provide reporting and analysis capabilities
- Provide a web-based system with web-based reporting capabilities
- Be accessible to level AA of the W3C Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0
- Be scalable and support a service-oriented architecture (SOA)
- Ensure data security and privacy
Testimonial
"The system is great. It is really easy to use and our staff have picked it up with
no problems at all."
Erica Stewart-Jones, Learning &
Development Advisor, NHS Health Scotland
Custom Software Solution
We managed the project, developed a custom web-based software solution
to meet the project's objectives, delivered the solution on time and within budget,
presented training to end users of the new software, and provided additional expertise
throughout the project.
Project Management
It was essential that the project was managed effectively and efficiently to ensure
successful completion within the constraints of the timescales
and budget.
We manage projects using our ISO 9001 / TickIT
certified quality management system, which includes equivalents of the core elements
of PRINCE2. For this project, we used the
core elements of the PRINCE2 methodology,
following the core processes and producing the relevant
PRINCE2 documentation.
We worked with NHS Health Scotland to define the project objectives
and criteria for measuring successful achievement of those objective, and to specify
detailed requirements. Staged delivery was used to ensure that usable software was
delivered as early as possible to test the deployment environment and ensure that
we were meeting NHS Health Scotland’s expectations.
Architecture and Design
The system was designed to comply with NHS IT Security Standards, with a flexible
security model (based on roles and permissions) providing granular control over user access to the system, including
a full audit trail.
The system was designed as a set of services, with the core functionality exposed
as web services enabling these services to be consumed by other systems as part
of a wider service-oriented architecture.
A flexible data model was designed to support the questionnaires, simplifying the
development of the data entry, and providing support for future modification of
the questionnaires without additional development effort.
A web-based system was required, with the browser-based application user interface
designed to conform to level AA of the W3C
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. The user interface was designed
to degrade gracefully and to remain fully functional, even with JavaScript disabled
in the browser.
Testing and Release
We performed rigorous system testing on each staged release prior
to releasing the software to NHS Health Scotland for User Acceptance Testing and
assisted NHS Health Scotland to deploy the system to their test environment.
Training and Online Help
We produced a User Guide containing an overview of the structure
of the application and instructions on how to perform the key functions supported
by the application, and the same content was included in the Online Help feature
of the system.
We also developed a training presentation and presented several
training sessions to end users, including those participating in the User Acceptance
Testing, to enable the users to become familiar with the system quickly to ensure
effective participation in the testing process and maximise the benefits of the
new system as quickly as possible.
NHS Scotland
AMCS Group is one of only ten approved suppliers under the Framework Agreement
for the Provision of Software Support and Development Services with NHS Scotland.
The current framework agreement runs from 2008 to 2012.