Let’s connect with Jeffrey Wood of The Princess Alexandra NHS Trust . Please leave your comments and questions for Jeffrey below. If you are interested in being featured in a member spotlight please email customerreference@8x8.com.
Tell us about you and Princess Alexandra Hospital.
I work for Princess Alexandra Hospital. We're an NHS acute hospital, on the outskirts of London, and I serve as the Deputy Director of ICT. I started off life in the Royal Navy and then moved into the private sector doing IT before it really was a thing. Gradually things changed over a period of time, and I worked in the financial services industry, then moved to the public sector to support various local councils and most recently took this role at NHS.
For our US-based readers, what is an NHS Trust?
An NHS Trust is a government owned department put in place after the second World War. Each trust is almost its own self-governing department within that department. We are almost a collection of small companies under one huge company. The NHS is the world's 10th largest employer, and considering how small the UK is, that's a major thing!
As a young child, did you envision a career in technology?
I actually fell into computers. In those days, if you wanted to play a video game you pretty much had to program it yourself. I got into programming, and I loved binary code when I was at school. Gradually after that I found that if I walked near a computer it seemed to fix itself, or at least that's what people used to say. I really wouldn't remember how to fix something, but I'd always work out a way of doing it.
How different are technology and processes in the public and private sector?
My wife has always been a nurse in the NHS. I would hear about the problems she was facing and think it can't be that bad. But stepping from the private sector into the public sector was stepping back in time. Then the public sector to the NHS was stepping back another five years. Because so many things we are looking at within the NHS are behind the private sector, it gives me the opportunity of seeing use cases elsewhere and bringing it into the NHS.
Tell us how you tackled your new technology challenges.
When I joined Princess Alexandra, 85% of our estate was desktops, and only about 15% laptops and 100 iPads. 65% of the estate was seven years or older in terms of end user devices, and that sort of mirrored across our infrastructure estate. It was the start of the big change to move us more to a laptop based organization.
What about your telephone system?
Our Phillips, on premise, telephony system was built in 1989. It had lots of bits cobbled onto it…. a little bit of VoIP, and then a little bit of something else and a little bit of something else. Nothing quite really worked together. One of the first jobs I did was to bring in 8x8 which also coincided with us moving a lot more of the estate to laptop based rather than desktop based.
You moved to laptops. You transitioned to 8x8. Covid hit. How did that work out?
We were ready with just a flick of a switch to move people to work from home and use the laptops and the cloud to telephony, to actually operate as though they were in the building. That significantly helped us as more investment was put into the NHS, and especially for us, we saw a lot more investment coming to ICT.
How does technology enable hospitals to be customer obsessed organizations?
I absolutely love the difference technology can make to people's lives, especially within the healthcare industry because a lot of what we are trying to do is helping people to live a better life from home. They don't need to spend all of their time in the hospital if we can give them the tools to look after themselves. I remember when the consumer was the very last person to get the best equipment. First it would tend to be the military, then it would be businesses and then it would be personal. Nowadays the personal equipment that you get, your iPhones, your Android phones, your laptops, Apple ipods and Alexas and all those sort of things goes actually out to the consumer first. Businesses are all sort of trying to catch up and wondering how best we can use it. So again, Alexa's capable of telling you if someone's fallen over in the house, they can listen for that sort of thing. So healthcare is becoming very much more about using what a consumer has to try and assist us to prevent them coming into the hospital rather than having everybody coming into the hospital and just filling out hospital beds when they could be better looked after at home.
Tell us about your contact centers.
We've set up contact centers in our radiology and occupational health departments where agents book appointments. We're leveraging 8x8's IVR, enabling callers to direct themselves to a patient ward, GP referrals, etc.
Are your contact center agents enjoying the new Agent Workspace?
We love it! The contact center pieces are brilliant. Because we've got so much more control over them now, we've been able to pass quite a bit of that control to the actual teams themselves that are running it so they can do some alterations and basic things themselves to actually change and to tweak the configuration to make it work better for them. That's been really useful for us.
What is a piece of advice you would give to someone who's starting out in IT?
It's great to go from different areas within the IT team, different short-term segments to understand what it is that you really like and it tends to be what you like you'll be really good at. Choose that area that you like best and concentrate all your time on developing yourself in that area.
What are your hobbies?
I'm a master scuba diver instructor, and I enjoy scuba diving in Bermuda. I used to play rugby but I still enjoy watching the team play, especially when there's a vets game going on.
Where do you find professional inspiration?
I belong to the British Computer Society, and I'm a chartered IT professional. Within the UK we have the healthcare news and we have health technology news as well. Both of those provide a lot of information for me in the healthcare sector. In both of those organizations, we have been up for awards, one of which was partially down to 8x8 itself. We had an award for our butterfly volunteers who, during COVID, provided facilities for people to contact their loved ones who were at the end of life or who they just hadn't seen for months because COVID prevented people coming into the hospital. We won an award for that and that was partially down to 8x8.
Read more about the Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust story here.