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16 September 2013

Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Following the creation of the Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in early 2012, the decision was taken to merge the two separate pathology laboratories into a single consolidated service operating across both the Basingstoke and North Hampshire and the Royal Hampshire County Hospital sites.

Moving to a single Pathology system was identified as a key step in reorganising and rationalising the service as well as reducing the overall costs. This process was simplified by both laboratories already running WinPath v5 and having very experienced system administrators and users.

For each discipline a “master” system was identified and the best elements of the other system then incorporated. The different workgroups were merged together to create a UAT environment to allow for full testing and further tweaking of the solution. At the go live the new system was rolled out over both laboratories and, at the same time, moving everyone onto the latest service pack to allow for the simultaneous go live of the new IBG Neo blood transfusion analysers.

While this project was underway the Trust also consolidated their electronic ordering onto a single Sunquest ICE and moved WinPath onto new virtual servers. The Trust also migrated to a new biochemistry analyser suite and redirected their GP work accordingly; made easy due to the single merged system.

The successful completion of this project now enables the Trust to move forward with reorganising and improving the service it offers to the end users.