About South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust
SLaM employs 4,800 staff in over 100 locations throughout South London. Working in partnership with four local authorities and with £330 million in turnover, SLaM provides mental health and substance misuse services.
Challenge
SLaM provides clinical and administrative systems to its own employees and more than 3,000 other local authority staff, both at SLaM-operated sites and at other locations. Creating, changing and removing user accounts was a paper-based process in which application forms were faxed to the IT department. Between data entry errors, poor handwriting, and illegible faxes, the process was slow and fraught with error.
"Staff turnover in SLaM is around 10 to 15 percent per month, so it's imperative that we keep our staff records up to date," said Chris Irving, IT Services Manager, SLaM. "We create, change or disable around 200 accounts every month, which is a lot of change to deal with using manual processes."
In addition to its own employees, SLaM provides IT resources for specific local authority users such as social workers, and to short-term users such as junior doctors on six-month training rotations, requiring access to patient information and business administration systems. In many cases, the user lists for these accounts are only available a few days in advance of the go-live date.
Novell Solution
The NHS Connecting for Health programme has selected Novell Identity Manager as its preferred solution, with an enterprise licence agreement covering all NHS organisations. For SLaM, the only expense was engaging with Novell business partner Salford Software to complete the implementation.
SLaM uses the NHS Employee Staff Records (ESR) system, which holds human resources and payroll data for all employees. The ESR data populates Microsoft Active Directory, which controls user access rights for SLaM systems. When an "Offer of Employment" letter is sent, the HR department updates ESR. Novell Identity Manager collects the new ESR and Active Directory data and automatically creates new accounts with the correct access permissions. The accounts are enabled on the employment start date specified in ESR (subject to confirmation that the new employee has attended for work).
If an employee changes job or role, Novell Identity Manager reflects the updated ESR data automatically, granting or revoking user access rights based on the Active Directory permissions. When a person joins or leaves the Trust, internal systems are triggered to add or remove the user from the internal staff directories.
Novell Identity Manager acts as a synchronisation hub between the ESR and Active Directory system, managing passwords for application access. For specific areas, such as a pharmacy stock control package, Novell Identity Manager manages single sign-on so that users do not need to log in to each application separately.
Results
By integrating Novell Identity Manager, the NHS Employee Staff Records system and Microsoft Active Directory, SLaM has eliminated its previous manual process for adding, moving, changing and deleting users for the vast majority of accounts.
"Novell Identity Manager is an excellent solution; Salford Software provided specialist project management and implementation services," said Chris Irving. "Error rates in provisioning have declined to zero. The IT department no longer has to deal with mountains of faxes, and Novell Identity Manager automatically manages all the regular employee accounts."
For doctors on training rotation, where the Trust may not know the final user list until a few days before the start date, and for non-SLaM staff such as local authority personnel, Novell Identity Manager imports spreadsheet data and creates appropriate accounts synchronised with Active Directory.
"We have reduced the administration requirement, which is a significant saving for SLaM," said Chris Irving. "With Novell Identity Manager, we have reduced the time to provision a new user from as much as two days to just four hours. Requiring users to remember only one set of credentials for accessing applications has improved end-user satisfaction and productivity, and reduced password-related calls to the service desk."
In the next phase of deployment, SLaM will incorporate contractor and agency staff into the provisioning process, and will use the validated spreadsheet system to further reduce manual user-account management.
"We will introduce password self-service capabilities using Novell Identity Manager that will cut down the number of service desk calls, and are planning to extend single sign-on to more applications," said Chris Irving. "Advice and support from Salford Software has helped make Novell Identity Manager a key part of the ICT Continual Service Improvement Programme at SLaM, benefiting users throughout the Trust."